Sandra Scarr

Babies need social interactions with loving adults who talk with them, listen to their babblings, name objects for them, and give them opportunities to explore their worlds.

names opportunity baby

Children thrive in a variety of family forms; they develop normally with single parents, with unmarried parents, with multiple caretakers in a communal setting, and with traditional two-parent families. What children require is loving and attentive adults, not a particular family type.

parent two children

Children are just different from one another, especially in temperament. Some are shy, others bold; some active, others quiet; some confident, others less so. Respect for individual differences is in my view the cornerstone of good parent-child relationships.

individual-differences views children

Parents who are cowed by temper tantrums and screaming defiance are only inviting more of the same. Young children become more cooperative with parents who confidently assert the reasons for their demands and enforce reasonable rules. Even if there are a few rough spots, relationships between parents and young children run more smoothly when the parent, rather than the child, is in control.

discipline running children

Until the Second World War, it was unthinkable for a married woman of the working or middle class to disgrace her husband by working after marriage, because her employment indicated that he was a poor provider

husband work war

Mothers and fathers act in mostly similar ways toward their young children. Psychologists are still highlighting small differencesrather than the overwhelming similarities in parents' behaviors. I think this is a hangover from the 1950s re-emergence of father as a parent. He has to be special. The best summary of the evidence on mothers and fathers with their babies is that young children of both sexes, in most circumstances, like both parents equally well. Fathers, like mothers, are good parents first and gender representatives second.

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The time-use studies also show that employed women spend as much time as nonworking women in direct interactions with their children. Employed mothers spend as much time as those at home reading to and playing with their young children, although they do not, of course, spend as much time simply in the same room or house with the children.

reading mother children

Babies learn most of what they know from interactions with their parents, but not of the formal, instructional variety. Babies learn from spontaneous, everyday events--the mailman at the door with a package to open...all of which need adult interpretation. They are real events of interest and concern to babies and young children....By contrast, infant education is artificial and out of context.

education baby children

Ideas about mothers have swung historically with the roles of women. When women were needed to work the fields or shops, experts claimed that children didn't need them much. Mothers, who might be too soft and sentimental, could even be bad for children's character development. But when men left home during the Industrial Revolution to work elsewhere, women were "needed" at home. The cult of domesticity and motherhood became a virtue that kept women in their place.

mother work children

Children need both latitude of expression and firmly enforced limits on their behaviors, in a blend that results in calm, patientmanagement. The key to success is to tailor the rearing environment to the developmental level of the child--what she or he can handle--and to individual differences among children.

individual-differences expression children

Day care poses no risk for children, provided that it is high quality.... Poor quality day care is risky for children everywhere.... The cost of poor quality day care is measured in children's lives. High quality day care costs only money.

poor-quality day-care children

A healthy newborn has been delivered in a more or less satisfying fashion. The baby is feeding well, has short nails and a clean bottom, and has not drowned. What now?

fashion healthy baby

It is important for practical and psychological reasons to call any reasonably stable group that rears children a family.... The advantage of this view is that traditional and nontraditional families can all be seen to serve the interests of children. Children can also feel comfortable with an approved family form, even if it is not traditional.

important views children

We know that babies develop as well in nonmaternal as in maternal care, as long as the care is of good quality. The issue is not who gives the care but the quality of that care,... The guilt trip is, in my view, a hangover of another era and of unacknowledged tactics to keep women in their proper place--at home full-time.

hangover home baby

The best way of thinking of an attachment in my view, is to see it as the outcome of an interaction between two people, each of whom contributes to the quality of the relationship. Most parents can promote a secure relationship with a calm, pleasant, patient baby. Only particularly sensitive and patient parents can promote a secure attachment to a difficult baby.

attachment baby thinking

Each era invents its own child. Over the past 500 years, conceptions of the child changed gradually from an ill-formed adult who must be subjugated to society's goals to a precious being who must be protected from unreasonable social demands. Childhood has come to be seen as a special period of life, rather than as a temporary state of no lasting importance for adulthood.

change children past

Given Freudian assumptions about the nature of children and the biological predestination of mothers, it is unthinkable for mothers voluntarily to leave their babies in others' care, without guilt about the baby's well-being and a sense of self-deprivation. Mothers need their babies for their own mental health, and babies need their mothers for their mental health--a reciprocal and symbiotic relationship.

mother baby children

All we know is that the school achievement, IQ test score, and emotional and social development of working mothers' children are every bit as good as that of children whose mothers do not work.

mother children school

Some television programs are made very attractive to young children by presenting short, rapidly moving sequences and ever-changing episodes.... Some experts now argue that slower- paced television fare that allows children time to think about the material is more valuable than the faster-paced programs that merely capture their attention.

children moving thinking

Parents ought to feel more comfortable about the care of their children than some experts would seem to permit. If children were so fragile and parenting so difficult to learn, where would we all be as adults?

parent experts children