Children aged 15 months and 24 months were observed with their mothers in a directed play situation. Mothers were asked to take an active role by ensuring that the children played with the full range of toys available. The children's responses to the mothers' control directives were assessed in terms of three types of compliance: orientation compliance, contact compliance, and task compliance. Differences in the overall rate for these three types were examined. Attention was also given to the conditions under which mothers were most likely to obtain the required response, in particular, the syntactical construction of the directive, the presence of referential nonverbal behavior, and the timing of the mother's utterance in relation to the child's current state of involvement in the object referred to. Considerable variations occurred in compliance rate according to the type of response required. Maternal controls were most likely to succeed if they formed part of a sequential attention-action strategy designed to manipulate the child's involvement state. These findings bear on a view of socialization that stresses the mutuality of the parent-child relationship; they also have implications for the concept and the assessment of compliance.

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This paper reports a study that investigated the effects of gender, Internet anxiety, and Internet identification on use of the Internet. The study involved 608 undergraduate students (490 females and 118 males). We surveyed the students' experience with the Internet, as well as their levels of Internet anxiety and Internet identification. We found a number of gender differences in participants' use of the Internet. Males were proportionally more likely to have their own web page than were females. They used the Internet more than females; in particular, they were more likely to use game websites, to use other specialist websites, and to download material from the Internet. However, females did not use the Internet for communication more than males. There was a significant positive relationship between Internet identification and total use of the Internet, and a significant negative relationship between Internet anxiety and total use of the Internet. Controlling for Internet identification and Internet anxiety, we found a significant and negative correlation between gender and use of the Internet. In total, all three of our predictors accounted for 40% of the variance in general Internet use: with Internet identification accounting for 26%, Internet anxiety accounting for 11%, and gender accounting for 3%.

The home computer use of 33 children aged between 7 and 11 years is described. These children and their parents were interviewed on four occasions. In addition, domestic computer use was monitored for 30 days in respect of the identity of user(s) and the nature and duration of their software use. Although parents had strong aspirations that household computers should support their child's learning and although parents' main software purchases were educationally oriented, children spent most of their time on games of a sort not typically found in their classrooms. This observation was explored through a comparative analysis of the home and school ecology. Description of the school setting was achieved by engaging with pupils and teachers attending the five schools from which the home‐based sample was drawn. Patterns of school computer use conformed to practices commonly reported for early education. However, this classroom context of computer use was shown to be very different to that sustained in homes. Parents took few steps to orchestrate the content or motive of children's computer activity and they rarely become directly involved in that activity themselves. These observations are discussed in relation to contemporary ambitions to influence the interface of home and school through the mediation of information and communications technology (ICT).

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