Mother-child interactions

We have been doing a study where we have been following-up children from two months of age, who are now 14 years old. These were children of first-time mothers, in stable relationships at the beginning of the study. They all had healthy infants and we started filming interactions when the babies were around two months old.

When we examine the quality of interactions, we see that depressed mothers are less sensitive. They tend to fall at the extremes of being rather remote with the baby, or else too intrusive. Nevertheless, it is important to stress that there are depressed mothers who have very good relationships with their babies and, conversely, well mothers who have poor relationships with their babies. It is not the case that depression is inevitably associated with difficulties. Depression just raises the risk that there will be problems.

One thing that we have looked at is what people say to their babies in a face-to-face play situation and we have found it particularly fruitful to analyse the content of the mother's speech.

• is she concerned with the baby's experience, does it focus on the baby's agenda?
• does she seem to see the baby as a real agent, someone who has got will and intentions of their own?
• does she criticise the baby, or, offer affectionate, endearing comments

What we have found is that the more the mother's speech at two months is focused on the baby's experience, rather than the mother setting the agenda and asking the baby to do what she wants, the more likely it is that the baby will score well on the Object-Concept tasks at nine months. This continues to five years: those mothers who were finding it particularly difficult to think about the baby's experience had children who, even at five, were more delayed cognitively.

These early interactions don't just give cues to cognitive development, they can also help us think about the child's emotional development. One chart which looks at the hostility the mother expressed towards the baby at two months shows that the greater the hostility, the more likely she is to think the child is badly behaved at age five. It seems that these relationship patterns early on can set things on a difficult path of development. Unless there is intervention, this can end up with the child developing behavioural difficulties.