title: Assessing parent-infant interaction during the perinatal period. Some cautions.
abstract: Pediatricians have recently been urged by professional groups to pay increased attention to parental behavior when serving and discharging newborns. These exhortations are well intended, but they may reflect a misunderstanding of developmental processes and foster a mistaken belief in the ease with which parenting problems can be identified and remedied. This article describes how early experiences affect children's development and then contrasts this view with a popular perspective based on misapplication of the medical model to the conceptualization of behavioral development.
authors.affiliation: Section on Social and Emotional Development, National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, Bethesda, Maryland, USA.
authors.forename: M E
authors.initials: ME
authors.lastname: Lamb
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D007223:Infant; D018730:Infant Behavior; D007231:Infant, Newborn / Q000523:psychology*; D009034:Mother-Child Relations; D009769:Object Attachment; D010287:Parent-Child Relations