The Relationships Between Mothers, Fathers, Infants, and Siblings in the First Two Years of Life.

This paper discusses the nature of the infant social world. Infants develop attachments to both parents. Father-child and mother-child relationships are qualitatively different. They involve different types of experiences and have different implications for the child's personality development. The fathers' sex-differentiating behavior focuses the children's--especially the boys'--attention on the same-sex parent. Early parent-infant interactions may facilitate gender role acquisition. Siblings seem to play an important role in facilitating infant mastery over the inanimate environment. It appears that infants are not attached to their preschool-aged siblings. Yet siblings may still exert an important impact on infant development. Parent-infant and sibling-infant relationships both underscore the need for theory and research on the complexity and multidimensionality of the infant social world. (Author/JLL)