Are Early Adult-infant Interactions Universal?—A South African view

Abstract This paper is based on an invited presentation in a symposium on “Identifying Universals in Human Development” held at the Biennial Meeting of the International Society for the Study of Behavioural Development, Amsterdam (28 June–2 July 1994) There is a wide agreement that mothers and their infants under 5–6 months of age engage in intense interpersonal interaction, and that this interaction is composed of performances by both adult and child in the domains of visual attention, vocalization and touch. Some stylistic differences in the interpersonal behaviour of mothers and young infants have been reported between Western dyads and dyads from other social and cultural groups. In particular, it has been suggested that African mothers behave differently with their infants from Western mother-infant dyads. These observed differences have raised questions about the universality of early infant development and the nature of the interpersonal experience in adult-infant interactions necessary to sustain normal social and cognitive development. These issues are considered, several observational studies of urban South African mothers and their infants, as well as a review of the relevant literature. The presented material raises a number of methodological and theoretical considerations, including: the central processes involved in early adult-infant interactions and how are they constrained by infant and adult capacities; the degree to which stylistic differences in maternal-infant behaviour reveal individual, social and/or cultural factors; and the extent to which reports of attentuated maternal behaviour, particularly from Africa, reflect constraints introduced during the process of research rather than the operation of cultural regulators on maternal behaviour.