This study was designed to look for patterns of parental behavior by assessing styles of child rearing in a novel way--through responses on an interactive computer program simulating an average day in the life of a mother and a preschooler. Presented to each subject (39 mothers of preschoolers and a control group of non-mothers) were 30 common child rearing problems to which subjects selected a response. Response options were designed to reflect authoritarian, authoritative, permissive, and uninvolved patterns. Nulliparous women responded to a fictive child, described to half the group as male. No consistent patterns of responses were subsequently detected: both mothers and non-mothers selected responses characteristic of the three basic child rearing patterns, often in equal proportions. Mothers responded differently from non-mothers on one-third of the questions. Results indicate that a simple typology of parental behavior may be inaccurate and suggest that parental behavior is flexible and modifiable, and that differences in maternal styles of child rearing are more subtle than had previously been described in the literature. (RH)