Relation of early socialization experiences to aggression in middle childhood.

Tins report presents one part of a followup study of the 5-year-old children whose early socialization experiences were described in Patterns of Child Rearing (Sears, Maccoby, & Levin, 1957). It attempts to trace the effects of some of those experiences on the children's aggressive behavior 6 years later. During the winter of 1951-52, 379 public school kindergarten children in Newton and Watcrtown, Massachusetts, were selected as subjects for a study of the child rearing antecedents of identificatio n. The design of that research required the measurement of certain aspects of both the children's behavior and the mothers' child rearing practices and attitudes. The measures of identificatio n which seemed appropriate, at that time, related chiefly to the extent of children's adoption of adult role behavior and to the stage of development of guilt feelings and other signs of conscience. Measures of such behavior were obtained from three sessions of doll play, two permissive and one structured (Levin & Scars, 1956; Sears, 1953), and from mother interviews (Sears et al., 1957). These interviews were mainly directed to the measurement of the antecedent (maternal) behavior, however; they were designed to secure information about aspects of the 1 From the Laboratories of Human Development of