CHILDHOOD SEXUALITY: INFANT-OTHER INTERACTION
During the first several years of life, the infant’s relationship to others centers mostly on relationships with the mother (or a mother substitute) and having physiological needs met, especially the need for food. Feeding is necessary for survival, but it is also an occasion for intimate contact with other persons as a part of the infant’s exploration of the environment. Objects are experienced by putting them in the mouth, by sucking, touching, eating, and biting. This basically autoerotic stage lasts for the first five or six months of life. From as early as two months of age onward and increasingly through the first year of life, infants are not so much passive and receptive as active in seeking interaction. Most infants show the need for the proximity of others sometime during the first quarter of the first year.
Attachment is a two-way process. Attachment behavior between mother and infant consolidates the affectional relationship. In studying the interaction of twenty-eight babies with their mothers, Ainsworth catalogued thirteen patterns of attachment besides those associated with feeding—the rooting response, sucking, and search for the breast. On the infant’s side, the thirteen include differential crying, smiling and vocalizing, visual-motor orientation, crying when the mother left, following, scrambling, burying the face, exploring from a secure base, clinging, lifting the arms and clapping the hands in greeting, and approaching through locomotion.
Preference for the mother is not present at birth; it must develop out of the feeding and caring experience. The infant’s earliest posture is one of undiscriminating responsiveness. In the first few weeks of life it can be assumed that the infant experiences the mother, and particularly her breast, as part of itself. The first few weeks of life can be characterized as an around-the-clock time of sleep alternating with waking periods in which the infant’s contact with the mother is directed by hunger rather than by any other drive or appetite. But the mother and the infant are two independent psycho-physiological systems. They interact through specific mechanisms of stimulation and pacification. In the process, circular social interaction becomes more discriminating, and the relations between the two become numberless and infinitely varied.
Most mothers in the nuclear family do not share the intimate care of their offspring with another adult (although more and more fathers are becoming involved) and are in a position to develop an unusually close relationship with their babies. Caldwell and Hersher found that such mothers, in contrast to mothers who shared care of the infant with others, were less intellectualized in their relationships with the baby, were more sensuous in their touching and handling, were more likely to vocalize, were more active and more playful with their six-month-old babies. At one year of age they were rated as more dependent upon their babies for the achievement of their own need gratifications. In general, the data suggests a comfortable relationship between infant and mother in the cases in which the mother had exclusive responsibility for the child.
Infants show differing personality traits, strengths in their aggressive instincts, for example. Some are placid. Some are quiet. Some are noisy and active. These temperaments stay with them as they grow. There are also male-female behavioral differences present at birth, though research findings are still sparse. The male infant has greater muscular strength at birth, but the female is in no way less active or expressive. The female infant from birth shows more oral sensitivity, engages in more frequent mouth-dominated approaches, and is a more frequent and more persistent thumb-sucker. Newborn females also exhibit greater cutaneous sensitivity than do males.
Parents treat male and female infants differently right from the start, hence there is constant parental reinforcement, not only of innate differences but also of differences in what society regards as gender-appropriate behavior. In other words, the infant’s unique male or female characteristics, as well as cultural expectations, may affect the nature of parent-infant interaction from the day of birth and onward. Moss found, for instance, that mothers had significantly more contact with infant boys than with girls on such variables as “attends” and “stimulates-arouses.”
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