Abstract
The task of our time is perhaps to retrace our steps and fill in the descriptive stage in psychology even now. Seeking to explain or predict given phenomena before knowing their nature or their distribution in the natural world may, after all, be to put the cart before the horse and to invite misleading assumptions and conclusions. If this is so, ethological data on the incidence of behavior are of vital interest to students of child development.
It has been said that, in its haste to step into the twentieth century and to become a respectable science, Psychology skipped the preliminary descriptive stage that other natural sciences had gone through, and so was soon losing touch with the natural phenomena. (Tinbergen, 1963, p. 411)
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© 1980 Springer Science+Business Media New York
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Lytton, H. (1980). Mothers, Fathers, and Young Sons. In: Parent-Child Interaction. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-0459-1_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-0459-1_3
Publisher Name: Springer, Boston, MA
Print ISBN: 978-1-4899-0461-4
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