This study examined the associations among mothers' insightfulness into their infants' internal experience, mothers' sensitivity to their infants' signals, and infants' security of attachment to their mothers. The insightfulness of 129 mothers of 12-month-old infants was assessed by showing mothers 3 videotaped segments of observations of their infants and themselves and interviewing them regarding their infants' and their own thoughts and feelings. Interviews were classified into 1 insightful and 3 noninsightful categories. Mothers' sensitivity was assessed during play sessions at home and at the laboratory, and infant-mother attachment was assessed with the Strange Situation. Mothers classified as positively insightful were rated as more sensitive and were more likely to have securely attached children than were mothers not classified as positively insightful. Insightfulness also accounted for variance in attachment beyond the variance explained by maternal sensitivity. These findings add an important dimension to research on caregiving, suggesting that mothers' seeking of explanations for the motives underlying their infants' behavior is related to both maternal sensitivity and infant attachment.

The associations were studied between early mother-child co-construction of a separation-reunion narrative and children's concurrent and later (a) emotion narratives and (b) behavior problems. Fifty-one children and their mothers were observed during a co-construction task when the children were age 4 1/2. At ages 4 1/2 and 5 1/2, children's narratives were elicited using the MacArthur Story-Stem Battery (MSSB), and mothers completed the Child Behavior Checklist. Results showed that children who were more emotionally coherent during the co-constructions had MSSB narratives that were more coherent, had more prosocial themes, and had fewer aggressive themes at ages 4 1/2 and 5 1/2. Moreover, such children had fewer behavior problems at both ages. The relations between narrative processes and emotion regulation are discussed.

This study examines the decisions of middle-class U.S. and Highland Mayan parents regarding sleeping arrangements during their child's first 2 years and their explanations for their differing practices. All 14 Mayan children slept in their mothers' beds into toddlerhood. None of the 18 U.S. infants slept in bed with their mothers on a regular basis as newborns, although 15 slept near their mothers until age 3 to 6 months, when most were moved to a separate room. The Mayan parents explained their practices in terms of the value of closeness with infants; the U.S. parents explained their practices in terms of the value of independence for infants. The U.S. families, but not the Mayan families, used bedtime routines and objects to facilitate the transition to sleep. It was time to give him his own r o o m. .. his own territory. That's the American way. Reflections of a middle-class U.S. mother This study was conducted white Gilda A. Morelli was a National Institute of Mental Health postdoctoral fellow at the University of Utah. Parts of the data reported were presented in Phoenix, Arizona, in November 1988, at the American Anthropological Association meeting. Completion of the work was made possible by a Boston College Faculty Research grant to Gilda A. Morelli. We would like to thank Alison Nash and Miyukui Nakagawa for their help in the initial planning of this study and David Wilkie and Paula Ivey for their comments on an earlier version of the article.

We investigated associations between children's representations of mothers in their play narrative and measures of children's and mothers' socioemotional adaptation, and explored the development of these representations between the ages of 4 and 5 years. Fifty-one children were interviewed using the MacArthur Story-Stem Battery to obtain their narrative representations of mothers. Positive, Negative, and Disciplinary representation composites were generated. Children who had more Positive and Disciplinary representations and fewer Negative representations had fewer behavior problems and their mothers reported less psychological distress. In addition, 5-year-olds had more Positive and Disciplinary representations and fewer Negative representations than did 4-year-olds, and there was moderate stability in individual differences in children's representations of mothers across the 2 ages. The results add an important dimension to research on parent-child relationships--that of children's perspectives on these relationships.

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