ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the aspects of the study of mother-child interaction as they might be relevant to the study of young mentally handicapped children. Parent-child interaction plays a vital role in child development. Bruner has described as scaffolding the process by which parents highlight the significance of certain acts of the child, and make obvious the associations the child needs to solve a particular problem. Infants are active participants in interaction. Infants have been shown to react very quickly to experimentally-induced changes in style of interaction. The quality of mother-child interaction is the most potent predictor at intermediate ages of later child cognitive, language and social functioning. Generally research into the relationship between parent variables and parent-child interaction has focussed on broad demographic categories rather than individual differences such as level of depression or the parents own experiences as a child. A teaching-task situation may offer information about parents teaching strategies.
