MOTHER-INFANT TEACHING INTERACTIONS AND ATTACHMENT SECURITY IN EURO-AMERICAN AND CENTRAL-AMERICAN IMMIGRANT FAMILIES

Forty mothers who had recently immigrated from Central America and 42 mothers from upper-middle-class Euro-American families were videotaped at home reaching their 4-, 8-, and 12-month-old infants to perform th ree tasks at each age. Overall, didactic maternal behavior decreased a s the infants grew older, whereas task-oriented infant behavior increa sed with age. Frequency and duration measures of maternal and infant b ehavior in the teaching sessions were largely unrelated to attachment status, as assessed in the Strange Situation when the infants were 13 months old. When the timing of maternal behavior relative to infant be havior was used as a measure of maternal sensitivity, some of the expe cted relations were evident, however. Dyads who were later classified as disorganized had negative scores on a measure of joint attention to objects. Resistant dyads were characterized by high levels of coordin ation of social attention, while disorganized dyads had very low or ne gative coordination scores. Mutual coordination of maternal teaching w as highest in dyads involving securely attached infants.