Mother-infant teaching interactions and attachment security in Euro-American and Central-American immigrant families

Abstract

Forty mothers who had recently immigrated from Central America and 42 mothers from upper- middle-class Euro-American families were videotaped at home teaching their 4-, 8-, and 12- month-old infants to perform three tasks at each age. Overall, didactic maternal behavior decreased as the infants grew older, whereas task-oriented infant behavior increased with age. Frequency and duration measures of maternal and infant behavior in the teaching sessions were largely unrelated to attachment status, as assessed in the Strange Situation when the infants were 13 months old. When the timing of maternal behavior relative to infant behavior was used as a measure of maternal sensitivity, some of the expected relations were evident, however. Dyads who were later classified as disorganized had negative scores on a measure of joint attention to objects. Resistant dyads were characterized by high levels of coordination of social attention, while disorganized dyads had very low or negative coordination scores. Mutual coordination of maternal teaching was highest in dyads involving securely attached infants.