Mothers, Fathers, and Children: Explorations in the Formation of Character in the First Seven Years: By Sylvia Brody and Sidney Axelrad, in association with Ethel Horn, Marsha Moroh, and Marvin Taylor. New York: International Universities Press, 1978, xiii + 669 pp., $35.00.

In relation to the increasing demand for a comprehensive approach to development, this volume offers important strands to the evolving fabric of understanding, without attempting to deal with either biological or ecological differences in mothers, fathers, or children. It provides a stimulating addition to the many studies of specific aspects of child development.

Brody and Axelrad's work is a further development of Brody's long focus on early roots of ego development: her Patterns of Mothering(1956) was an analysis of the mothers' handling of 32 infants from the 128 babies observed by psychologists and a pediatric psychiatrist in Escalona and Leitch's (1952) "non-normative" study in Topeka—a very different town from the urban setting in which Brody and Axelrad's 1970 study of infants and mothers were seen. The present volume presents findings from a followup of 120 of this second group of infants from the ages of two or three to seven years. These babies had come from a large metropolitan hospital and included only those free from defects; their families covered a range from lower- to upper-middle-class socioeconomic groups. The followup involved great effort to locate the families who had moved to other states or even abroad. Since the subjects of our non-normative followups of those Topeka infants still living in Topeka overlapped somewhat with those in Brody's 1956 study, some comparisons will come to mind.

The basic purpose of Brody's studies was to provide empirical evidence for the hypothesis that attitudes and behavior of mothers with their infants show continuity through the early years, and the development of the infant's object relations follows a sequence from need gratification, cathexis of the mother, to things and ideas. Adequacy of the child's adaptation to school at age seven is assumed to be related to the adequacy of the mothering experienced in infancy and subsequently. In the followup study interviews with fathers were added.

The overall or