Father interaction and separation protest.

Abstract

Thirty-six 1-year-old middle-class children with fathers who spent differential time with them at home were observed in two experimental contexts separated by 2 weeks. In the first, each infant was shown six to eight repetitions of three different nonsocial events followed by a change in the repeated standard. In the second, each infant experienced the unannounced entrances and departures of his mother, father, and a female stranger. The infants who were most upset when alone with the stranger came from low-father-interaction families and became bored most rapidly with the nonsocial stimuli. The infants who were least fearful with the stranger came from high-father-interaction families and displayed the greatest interest in and smiling to the inanimate stimuli. It was argued that crying or protest to separation is a complex phenomenon influenced by discrepancy, temperament, and level of cognitive development and is not a sensitive index of the intensity of the child's emotional bond to his parent. Infant protest following separation from the mother has been used as a partial index of the strength of the mother-infant bond, in which case it is assumed that the strength of that bond covaries with the amount of social interaction (Schaffer& Emerson, 1964). Ainsworth and her colleagues (Ainsworth 1963, 1967; Ainsworth & Bell, 1970; Ainsworth, Bell, & Stayton, 1971) have questioned that practice and suggested that separation fear reflects an insecure attachment between infant and mother. One of the reasons for the ambiguity surrounding the relation of this phenomenon to the child-parent bond is that separation protest is most often measured in a setting in which a mother leaves her child either in an unfamiliar room or in a familiar room with an unfamiliar person (Ainsworth & Bell, 1970; Fleener & Cairns, 1970; Littenberg, Tulkin, & Kagan, 1971). It is not clear, therefore, whether the primary cause of protest is disruption of or