ABSTRACT
This chapter reports results from a short-term longitudinal study examining the influence on toddler mastery motivation and competence of three aspects of the early social environment: mother-child attachment security, maternal scaffolding behaviour, and family climate. This study extends previous research, first, by including multiple measures of mastery motivation derived from free play, structured tasks and maternal perceptions; second, by repeating measures at two points during toddlerhood to allow for prediction over time and assessment of stability of key measures; and third, by employing multiple regression to determine predictability of outcome measures using several measures of the child's early social environment.
