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This work is the latest summation of a longitudinal research project that began in 1963. A sample of 131 normal, caucasian, American-born mothers and their normal newborn children was originally selected to study the question of whether maternal responsiveness was stable throughout the first year, and if so, whether types of maternal styles were related to qualities of infant development. This project, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health, had grown out of an interest in the significance of the oral phase for qualities of infant development. The thesis was that gratifications and deprivations experienced in infancy will have lasting impact on perceptual, social, cognitive and drive development. The data were derived from interviews with mother, standardised scales of infant development, and a film of mother feeding her infant. For the most part, the scoring of maternal attitudes and behaviour, from interviews and from the feeding film, was done with subjective clinical rating scales. Findings of this first project were reported in Anxiety and Ego Formation by Sylvia Brody and Sidney Axelrod (New York: Int. Univ. Press, 1970).
Subsequent funding was received from the William T. Grant Foundation to continue studying the development of these children (now a sample of 121) from the age of 2 to 7. The findings were published in Mothers, Fathers, and Children, by the same authors (New York: Int. Univ. Press, 1978). One purpose was to determine the stability of the developmental differences among the children as they had been assessed at the end of their first year, and which had been related to maternal adequacy. A second purpose was to ascertain whether there was continuity in maternal behaviour and attitudes from age one to 7 years. The data were derived from yearly parental interviews, films of mother–child interaction, observations of the children in school, and yearly standardised IQ tests and a projective test, the CAT. The findings, as summ