ERIC Number: ED172947
Record Type: RIE
Publication Date: 1979-Mar
Pages: 14
Abstractor: N/A
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: N/A
Observing Play Between Mothers and Toddlers.
Slaughter, Diana T.; And Others
This document on mother-infant interaction reports differences found between mothers in a parent education program and a control group. The parent education program provided two different informal methods of stimulating mothers' awareness of their influence on their children's learning and development. Both programs stressed maternal responsivity to the child's needs and ongoing behaviors. The subjects were 68 mother-infant dyads grouped by program participation: (1) mothers in a discussion group (N=21), (2) mothers who had observed demonstrators modeling toy play with their children (N=19) and (3) the control dyads (N=28). The dyads were videotaped for 24 minutes each on two occasions in a simulated living room setting and behavior was coded at 10-second intervals. A higher degree of mother-infant interaction was found for program mothers (particularly in the discussion group) than for the controls at the second observation). Differences in the infants' play, however, were not found to be in a linear relation to program vs. control. The data appear to suggest that the three groups of children developed different structural patterns of play over time and that they used language differently during play. Five tables present results. (Author/BH)
Publication Type: Speeches/Meeting Papers; Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: National Inst. of Child Health and Human Development (NIH), Bethesda, MD.; Grant Foundation, New York, NY.
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Note: Paper presented at the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development (San Francisco, California, March 15-18, 1979)