Interaction of mothers with their infants who are mentally retarded, retarded with cerebral palsy, or nonretarded.
Mother-infant interaction was observed during 15 minutes of free play in the homes of 40 families with 8- to 36-month-old infants from the following groups: mentally retarded, both retarded and cerebral palsied, nonretarded MA-matched, nonretarded CA-matched. One-way, repeated measures analyses of variance followed by Tukey multiple range tests for the paired contrasts indicated that mothers of both groups of developmentally disabled infants were more directive than the mothers of the nonretarded infants. Developmentally disabled infants were more compliant than both groups of nonretarded infants. They also demonstrated an overall lower level of behavior and engaged in less verbal interaction than the nonretarded CA-matched infants. Physical contact was more frequent for cerebral palsied infants and their mothers than for all other mother-infant groups. The communicative patterns reported for these groups were interpreted according to Bell's (1971) limiting control strategy, which predicts that mothers tolerate infant behavior within their expectations and actively attempt to keep their infants' behavior within these boundaries.
D002547:Cerebral Palsy / Q000150:complications / Q000523:psychology*; D002675:Child, Preschool; D003299:Cooperative Behavior; D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D008607:Intellectual Disability / Q000150:complications / Q000523:psychology*; D009034:Mother-Child Relations; D014110:Touch; D014705:Verbal Behavior