Nurturance and Nurturance-Withdrawal in Relation to the Dependency Behavior of Preschool Children1

This investigation is based on the hypothesis that non-nurturance by an adult is more strongly associated with the occurrence of dependency behavior in young children than is nurturance alone. The naturalistic studies of Sears et al. (ii), Beller (i), and Smith (I2) all contain data which show a positive relationship between amount of parental frustrations (non-nurturance) and the frequency of dependency behavior observed in young children. Similar results were obtained in the laboratory studies of Gewirtz (5, 6, 7), although Carl's laboratory findings with respect to this hypothesis were inconclusive (2). The present study was designed to explore the relationship between one specific form of non-nurturance-the withdrawal of nurturance-and young children's acquisition of responses which elicit adult approval. This relationship was studied in the laboratory where some manipulation of the relevant antecedent conditions was possible. The method of this study has been to provide a comparison in the learning of simple responses which elicit adult approval between a group of children consistently nurtured by an experimenter and another group who were nurtured and then rebuffed (nurturance-withdrawal). It was predicted that children in the presence of an adult female experimenter who withdraws her nurturance in this fashion will learn simple tasks eliciting adult approval in fewer trials and with fewer errors than children 1 This study is based on a doctoral dissertation submitted by the author to the Graduate School of Education of Harvard University. Parts of this investigation were reported at the 1956 meetings of the American Psychological Association in Chicago, Illinois. The author wishes to acknowledge the helpful criticisms of Dr. Harry Levin in the preparation of this study.