Conclusions and Implications

Abstract

We have come to the end of a long journey. This book has presented a natural-history account of child rearing, with all the details of family interchanges observed in the home. But beyond the descriptive account, we identified, by means of analysis of behavior sequences, the parental contingencies that facilitated (or inhibited) certain child actions, particularly in the area of attachment and compliance behavior; further, looking at the process through the other end of the telescope, we identified the effects that the child’s attachment and compliance behavior had on certain parental actions. We also examined some of the factors affecting parent-child communication. For a complementary view of more long-term socialization effects, we employed regression analyses, which indicated how well parental practices and attitudes predicted some major child characteristics, viewed as traits.