Effects of Infant Development on Mother-Infant Interactions

Abstract

GREEN, JAMES A.; GUSTAFSON, GWEN E.; and WEST, MEREDITH J. Effects of Infant Development on Mother-Infant Interactions. CHILD DEVELOPMENT, 1980, 51, 199-207. Home observations were made of the social interactions of 14 infants and their mothers when the infants were 6, 8, and 12 months of age. The purpose was to document how changing social and motor capabilities of infants affect their daily social encounters. To this end, the social interactions between the mother and infant were taken as the units of analysis; changes in the initiations and the contents or themes of interactions were shown to be related to developmental changes in infants. With increasing age, infants more often initiated interactions using directed social behaviors, and mothers more frequently initiated games, terminated or redirected infants' ongoing activities, and issued verbal requests. Mothers also performed proportionally fewer caretaking activities and less repositioning of their infants. Certain initiation types and themes showed reliable correlations as well as changes in the rate of occurrence over the 6-month period. Infants' locomotor ability was shown to be related to many of these changes in maternal behavior and, particularly, to the increasing frequency of infants' activities that mothers attempted to terminate or redirect. The results demonstrate (a) that the infant's social environment is determined in part by the infant's developmental status but (b) that there are consistent differences among infant-mother dyads across time.