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The extent to which 42-months and 50-months-old preschool children interacted with adults in school was not related to how much they interacted with peers. Ways in which interactions with adults differed from those with peers are documented. These differences are likely to have differential effects on personality development. In turn, their roots may be found in the personalities of the children on arrival a t school, and thus probably in the home background. Here sex and sibling status differences are explored. Boys oriented more towards peers than girls, whilst girls and firstborns tended to interact with adults more than did boys or second-borns. Some approaches to child development suggest that the early parent-child relationship has an overriding influence on subsequent personality development. Bowlby (1973, p. 369), for instance, writes 'And no variables, it is held, have more far-reaching effects on personality development than have a child's experiences within his family: for, starting during his first months in his relations with his mother figure, and extending through the years of childhood and adolescence in his relations with both parents, he builds up working models of how attachment figures are likely to behave towards him in any of a variety of situations; and on those models are based all his expectations, and therefore all his plans, for the rest of his life'. Other workers, by contrast, stress that the complementarity inherent in child-adult relationships, and especially the unidirectional respect and authority, limit their importance for the development of personality, and argue that the capacities for interpersonal perception, understanding of self and sensitivity in close relationships can develop only through the reciprocity of peer-peer interactions. Whilst relationships with adults involve respect, authority and prestige, only peer-peer relationships involve the simple intercourse between equals necessary for truly mutual understanding (e.