Early Mother-child Interaction Research Articles

Play of mothers with babies: some relationships between maternal personality and early attachment and development processes.

This article is a review of some of the ongoing research into the relationships among attachment, personality, and learning. The author emphasizes that the focus of research in the field of early childhood is moving into the area of early mother-child interactions. It is stressed that the child's initial approaches toward understanding his environment take place within the context of the continuing relationship with his mother. More subtle and precise techniques are needed for defining and exploring the nature and effects of the maternal personality on the development of the child. Present research and common sense point to the extreme importance of the earliest communications between mother and baby. Play is indicated as an irreplaceable early experience underlying the child's cognitive and linguistic development. The mother's physical and mental health, as well as her ability to involve herself with her baby are vital factors in the child's future learning styles and interactional patterns. Several studies are discussed which found high positive correlations between maternal personality and early interactional styles. The author strongly suggests that the implications of these findings and the significance of their predictive values warrant considerable further investigation.

Damn the Simplicities

A major advance in our understanding of early mother-child interaction was made by Klaus and Kennell when they reported that early contact between a mother and her newborn infant promoted bonding and even led to improved development at 1 year of age. In spite of questions concerning their results, others are also reporting positive effects of home support by relatively untrained women. In this issue of Pediatrics, Siegel and colleagues1 summarize these studies and report on a carefully controlled study which was designed to test the power of continuing postpartum home visiting and early bonding. They show that at 4 months of age there were significant differences in mother-child interaction between those who had early and sustained hospital contact followed by home support compared to those who did not.

Adolescent mothers and their infants: psychological factors in early attachment and interaction.

Thirty adolescent mothers and their infants who had few medical and psychological difficulties showed a positive adjustment to motherhood through the first six postpartum weeks. The ego strength of the adolescents and the infants' behavioral individuality were the factors most strongly related to the quality of early mother-child interaction and attachment.

The psychodynamics and developmental psychology of the borderline patient: a review of the literature.

The author reviews the psychodynamics and developmental psychology of the borderline patient as described in the literature on intensive therapy, early mother-child interaction, and family interaction. Focusing on the borderline patient's characteristic difficulties in intimate relationships, he describes the patient's use of splitting and projective identification as seen in the characteristic transference-countertransference interaction in intensive therapy. These primitive defensive mechanisms, which are also utilized by family members, appear to contribute to a failure of empathic responses both during the child's early development and in the family interactions during his adolescence. The author concludes that conceptual attempts to relate adult and child phenomena, although highly speculative, create new and useful perspectives for the treatment of the borderline patient.

AN EVALUATION OF THE HIGHBERGER EARLY-ADJUSTMENT-TO-SCHOOL SCALE

Highberger (4) has described a method for measuring the young child's initial adjustment to nursery school. This Early-Adjustment-to-School Scale (EAS) is a global measure of adjustment composed of ratings on 54 behavior items. The items included in this scale cover a broad range of social and emotional behaviors commonly observed in groups of 2- and 3-year-old children. Most prominent in the scale would seem to be items relating to dependency-withdrawal, sociability, assertiveness, and some forms of aggression. The procedure for the EAS includes: (a) systematic observation of the children in a preschool group from the fifth through fifteenth days of school attendance; (b) recording, during this time, the frequency with which the individual child evidences each type of behavior included in the scale; (c) preparation of ratings based on the observation records; (d) combining the ratings into a total EAS score. There are a number of uses for a reasonably objective method of evaluating the child's early adjustment to school. Workers with groups of children are often concerned about the effects of group experience on the 2- or 3-year-old. Yet teachers have lacked objective criteria with which to assess the child's behavior during the early weeks of preschool experience. Developmental psychologists have been interested in the young child's reactions to separation from his mother, both as a consequence of the nature of early mother-child interaction and as a predictor of later trends in personality development. The Highberger technique offers promising aid in approaching problem areas such as these. Although it is based on a broad definition of adjustment (and thus poses some problems for the researcher or teacher), the EAS introduces greater precision to the measurement of initial school adjustment than has been the case heretofore. The EAS is, however, extremely cumbersome and time-consuming (hence expensive) to use. Ten days of concentrated observation are needed prior to rating and the ratings themselves are difficult for an unsophisticated observer. In her original publication Highberger reported data relating to the reliability of total EAS scores, the reliability of individual items, and the relation of EAS total scores to teacher judgments of the child's adjustment and to a measure of maternal behavior. It seems, however, that empirical

Influences of early mother-child interaction on identification processes.

Influences of early mother-child interaction on identification processes.