The goal of the study was to examine the joint and distinct contribution of attachment security and social anxiety to Arab children's peer competence in middle childhood. We focused on Arab children as very little research has examined close relationships for this group. A sample of 404 third-, fourth- and fifth-grade Arabic students (203 boys and…

How individuals construct narratives involving attachment figures (e.g., parents) should reflect their representation of those individuals as either comforting or unsupportive (Bowlby, 1969). Similarly, how individuals talk about parents' childhood experiences may also reflect their attachment representation. Sixty-five 13- to 16-year-old…

The aim of this report was to investigate the associations between attachment state of mind, romantic attachment style, and indices of maternal functioning in two relational spheres: the mother-child relationship (i.e., maternal sensitivity and child attachment security) and the marital relationship (i.e., mothers' and their partners' marital…

Designed with procedural and methodological controls which were not always adequate in earlier studies, this study tests the hypothesis that early and enhanced contact between mothers and infants after delivery facilitates maternal attachment behavior. Thirty mother-infant pairs from a lower-middle-class population were studied. (Author/MP)

Popular culture today characterizes middle-class parents as being consumed with anxiety about their children. Drawing on more than 100 consumer reviews of baby monitors published on Epinions.com, the author examines how parents respond to that anxiety. Although Epinions.com reviewers are not representative of the population at large, they do…

This study examined the differential effects of sex of parent, sex of child, and sex of stranger on infant behavior in a stranger-separation situation. Year-old infants (16 males and 19 females) from middle-class families were observed and videotaped twice, at one-week intervals, in a modification of Ainsworth's laboratory stranger and separation…

The purpose of this study was to investigate whether or not infants who had experienced different types of naturally-occurring, significant separations from an attachment figure during the first year of life differed in their response to separation at 12 months of age. Thirty-three 12-month-old Caucasian infants from middle class, intact families…

In the West, institutions are considered the worst environment for rearing young children. It was thus surprising to discover on the 2002 Fulbright Travel Seminar to China that boarding schools for children two years of age and older were popular among affluent parents. This article uses observations of the first author in China, cultural…

A total of 20 children, between 17 and 38 months old, were observed in their day care centers and in a standardized laboratory procedure. In both settings, preseparation, separation, and reunion situations were observed. Observers coded proximity-increasing and proximity-decreasing behaviors to mother and to other adults; in addition, distress,…

Examined was the transition made by parents to the "empty nest" phase of family development. Two basic hypotheses were tested: children's growing independence and departure from the home does not represent loss for most parents, but rather is experienced as a gain; and men and women appear to experience the transition differently and…

This intensive longitudinal study of mother-infant interaction during the first year of life focuses on the development of attachment. Data on 26 middle-class families were collected by five methods: (1) naturalistic observation of each mother-infant pair during 4-hour home visits, which occurred at 3-week intervals from the infants' 3rd to 54th…