ABSTRACT
for several years, i conducted a home-based naturalistic study of eight families. When I began, each family consisted of a mother, a father, and a child in the second year of life. Four of the children were boys; four were girls. All were first children. The parents, all volunteers, were middle-class professionals. In six of the eight families, there is now a second child. It has thus become possible to compare the behavior of some fathers and mothers with children of each sex, although not to control for some birth-order effects or the possibility, as some epidemiological data suggest, that parenting improves with practice (Rutter, 1979).
