Caregiver-Infant Interactions

• Reciprocity


  The actions in one, elicits response in the other.
• Alert phases


  From birth babies signal when they are ready to interact.

  
  

  Feldman and Eidelman - mothers pick up on and respond to baby's alertness around two-thirds of the time.

  
  

  Feldman - From around 3 months, this interaction becomes increasingly frequent and involves mother and baby playing attention to each other's signals.

  
• Active involvement


  - Babies as well as caregivers can take active role.

  - Brazelton et al described interaction as a dance because its just like a couples dance where each partner responds to each other persons moves

  
• Interactional synchrony


  A form of communication in which the caregiver responds to infant signals in a well-timed, rhythmic, appropriate fashion and both partners match emotional states, especially positive ones.

  
• Meltzoff and Moore (1977)


  - Modelled tongue protrusion, mouth opening, lip protrusion and sequential finger movement to 18 new-borns aged 12-21 days in two separate experiments.

  - The results of the study indicated that when infants viewed a modelled gesture, they produced significantly more matching responses to the modelled gesture than when viewing a different modelled gesture.

  
• Isabella et al (1989)


  Observed 30 mothers and their infants, they found the higher levels of synchrony were associated with better quality attachments.

  
• Strengths of caregiver-infant interactions

  Filmed observations

  - Establishes the inter-rater reliability of observations.

  - Babies don't know they are being observed, so their behaviour doesn't change in response to observation (this is generally the main problem for overt observations).

  - Therefore has good reliability and validity.
• Limitations of caregiver-infant interactions

  Difficulty observing babies

  - Young babies lack co-ordination and much of their bodies are almost immobile.

  - It is difficult whether a baby is smiling or passing wind.

  - We cannot know whether a movement such as a hand twitch was random or triggered by something the caregiver has done.

  
  

  Developmental importance

  - Feldman (2012)

  - Ideas like synchrony simply give names to patterns of observable caregiver and baby behaviours.

  - We can't be certain from observational research alone that reciprocity and synchrony are important for a child's development.