ABSTRACT
The noted child psychiatrist, Stella Chess, once observed that “All parents are environmentalists … until they have their second child!” A central theme in our research on the contextual significance of temperament is that children possess characteristics that allow them to be agents in their own development. This idea is certainly not news to those who have been involved over the past 15 years in reading and generating the literature on personality and social development. However, it was only about 17 years ago that Bell (1968) published his influential paper on a reinterpretation of the direction of effects in socialization research. Nevertheless, 10 years later, Hartup (1978) found it still useful to remind colleagues that socialization is best viewed as a reciprocal process, rather than as one involving a unidirectional social molding of children by parents. Even more recently, Scarr and McCartney (1983) argued that a child’s organismic characteristics, represented by his or her genotype, may be the “driving force” of cognitive, personality, and even social developments.
