The role of parent-child relationships in child development.

Abstract

Within accounts of personality development and socialization over the past century, the central role of parent-child relationships has been emphasized with great consistency. Freud’s (e.g., 1940) emphasis on the importance of early parent-child relationships and his conclusion that children’s experiences in early life can have lasting influences on later life have been especially influential, with a focus on the infant-mother relationship especially prominent in his later work. In many respects, these concerns resonated in the theoretical debates that characterized the second half of the twentieth century. During this period, many scholars switched their allegiance from psychoanalytic theory to a perspective based on attachment theory, which itself reflected the integration of psychoanalytic, cybernetic, and ethological theory and therefore nicely exemplified the forces that have helped shape the emergence of developmental science. Within the broader debate between perspectives inspired by psychoanalysis and learning theory, which stressed the primacy of observable patterns of interaction (for a history, see Maccoby, 1992), attachment theory has become the dominant perspective on parent-child relationships, in part because it has accommodated the emerging cognitivist paradigm (the assumption that psychology should focus on mental processes) that has become popular (Carpendale & Lewis, 2006).

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