The present study examined mothers' emotional availability (EA) during daytime free play and bedtime as a mediator of linkages between maternal nighttime sleep and infant-mother attachment. Participants included 153 mothers (85% White) with infants (53% female). When infants were 1, 3, 6, 9, and 12 months, maternal sleep was assessed using…

Background: Fathers are increasingly acknowledged as active participants in rearing young children, yet few observational measures recognize gender-differentiated parenting and can be used by practitioners and researchers to assess and improve fathers' parenting capacity in playful settings, in order to inform program effectiveness. Two potential…

Child-child similarity on attachment and temperament were examined, in turn, as predictors of interaction quality between previously unacquainted children. At 33 months, child-mother attachment security was assessed, and parents reported on child temperament. At 39 months, 114 children were randomly paired into 57 same-sex dyads and observed…

The authors examined the relation of the Home Observation for Measurement of the Environment (HOME) Inventory (B. M. Caldwell & R. H. Bradley, 1984) for 0- to 6-year-old Sundanese Indonesian children with the quality of the mother-child attachment relationship (n = 44) and attachment-related behaviors during play interactions (n = 37) and with…

Distress in response to brief maternal separations was examined in a sample of 93 predominantly home-reared infants using the Ainsworth strange situation paradigm. At 18 months, the age when separation protests begin to decline, securely attached infants are better able than anxiously attached infants to tolerate maternal separations. (Author/RH)

This study examined the relationship between the security of preschool children's attachment relationship to their parents and how they negotiated and managed hypothetical conflict with peers. Participating were 66 preschool-age children recruited from child care facilities and residing in a large urban area in the southeastern United States. The…

Research has shown contradictory results on the relationship of infant attachment security to play and mastery behavior, at times predicting the cognitive quality of play and at other times predicting the affective quality of play. In order to test the hypotheses that, during play, attachment security would predict only positive affect,…

Studied partner and site novelty for mother-infant, stranger-infant, and mother-stranger face-to-face interactions. Found that adult-infant vocal timing measures at age 4 months did predict attachment and cognition at age 12 months. Comparison of mother-infant and stranger-infant interactions suggested the dynamics of infants' early…