RELATIONSHIPS OF INFANTS WITH PEOPLE: A BRIEF OUTLOOK

RELATIONSHIPS OF INFANTS WITH PEOPLE: A BRIEF OUTLOOK
(Vinod Anand)

The culture into which a child is born determines the limits of his opportunities for physical, cognitive, and social development. Role prescriptions and ideals for child-rearing, although clear in simple, stable societies, are often confusing in a rapidly changing culture. En the United States methods of child-rearing change relatively fast. A variety of attitudes and methods exist at any one time, varying with such factors as economic level and stage of family development. The infant himself is active in determining how people respond to him. Appearance, sex, and temperament are significant. Sex-linked behavior is influential in shaping mother— infant interactions. An infant’s well-being is affected by the fit between his temperament and his family.
Scheduling or timing is basic in the care and guidance of infants. The needs of all family members have to be balanced and adjusted in mutual regulation, taking special account of the baby’s immaturity. At the same time that the family takes care of the infant’s requirements for food, rest, exercise, and cleanliness, they also build relationships and attitudes. Intellectual development is influenced through all experiences, as well as during play and stimulating interactions. Infant care also includes restrictions, many of which are applied in order to ensure safety and health, others of which exist for the purpose of making life comfortable for other family members. Especially during the stage of development of the sense of autonomy, healthy growth requires clear, firm, minimal restrictions, within which the child can operate freely. Toilet training is accomplished more quickly when begun later, rather than earlier, in infancy. The mother’s personality, especially her warmth or coldness, is a factor in success. In toilet training, the mother requires the child to substitute a more mature form of behavior for an immature pattern. In restricting sex activity, however, the mother asks the child to give up an activity without substituting for it.
Emotions become differentiated as the child develops. Love, a term with many implications, has been studied in the context of attachment. An infant shows attachment to another person when he shows desire for the presence, contact, and response of that person. Attachment is shown by selective smiling and vocalizing and by crying at separation from the attachment object. The mother is usually the first attachment object, the father the second. Babies tend to select responsive, stimulating people as objects for their affection. Exploration is facilitated by the presence of an attachment object. The child leaves the mother briefly as attachment bonds become elastic.
Intense infant—mother relationships are frequent in cultures where the mother has little help with the care of her baby. When separated from the mother to whom he is firmly attached, the baby shows disturbance and disorganization. Separation and other love-deprivation experiences have to be interpreted in the life context of the child. Experiments with monkeys suggest that play with peers may compensate somewhat for deprivation in infant—adult affectional relationship. Infant peer relationships are fostered in collective societies.
Infants show fear reactions to intense stimuli, pain, and sudden changes in stimulation. Fear of strangers develops after attachment. The dark is often frightening. Fear of novelty requires having built some schemas which permit discrimination of the familiar and the new. In coping with fear-provoking situations, an infant, like all people, only more so, gains courage and reassurance from the presence of a person to whom he is attached.
Anger involves tension and attack in connection with a blocking situation. Anger outbursts occur most frequently during the second year, when the child is very eager to make choices and yet lacks experience and skills necessary for independent successful action. Parents can minimize young children’s anger outbursts by meeting their physical needs before tensions become acute and by maintaining firm, consistent, yet reasonable, control.
Maternal deprivation can take many forms, each of which derives some meaning from the cultural context. Recovery of the child depends upon the form and timing of the deprivation and the form and timing of ameliorative efforts. The battered child is a result of severe parental disturbance in a non-supportive social setting.

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