Social and Emotional Development II

Abstract

As infants grow older and their interactions with others increase in number and complexity, newer types of social relations emerge. These new social relations involve more than just proximity-establishing and proximity-maintaining behaviors. To understand the nature of these new social relations, consider the following hypothetical situations. In the first, several infants are isolated from normal society and left to develop on their own, and we observe what interactional patterns emerge and evolve. We compare that group to a second group of infants who grow up in two-parent families comprising several siblings and who attend well-supervised day care programs followed by preschool, etc. Most people would probably agree that we would observe significant differences in the interactional patterns between both groups.