ABSTRACT
A four-year-old's capacity for behaving in any particular manner is in practice of lesser importance than his mother's expectations about such behaviour. As a general conclusion on four-year-olds' functional independence, it appears that children of this age are not for the most part called upon to do as much as they are known to be capable of, and that often they would be reasonably willing to do more than is in fact asked of them. To understand why the pressures for independence are so restrained, this chapter turns again to the mothers' own feelings. It was found that 48% of these children are said to be capable of playing on their own, without needing the mother's attention, for more than an hour; 24% could be expected to do this for between 31 and 60 minutes; but 28% never play on their own for more than half an hour at a time. Class differences are negligible here.
