ABSTRACT
In North America, psychological theories about the origins of personality and the nature of early social development have generally stressed the central roles of child-rearing practices, parental attitudes, and interpersonal relationships as the primary determinants of children’s emerging social, emotional, and cognitive styles (Ainsworth, 1969; Maccoby & Martin, 1983). More recent views about early learning usually acknowledge that children impose some limits on their own socialization experience, and thus, modem models usually reformulate classic concerns about early parenting in terms of the facilitative roles of adults, who furnish the necessary “scaffolding” for children’s emerging psychological skills (Bruner, 1975; Nelson, 1975; Olson, Bates, & Bayles, 1984).
