The ecocultural niche of families with mentally retarded children: Evidence from mother-child interaction studies

JOURNAL OF APPLIED DEVELOPMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY 9r 85-106 (1988)

The Ecocultural Niche of Families with Mentally Retarded Children: Evidence from Mother-Child Interaction Studies PHYLLIS SCHNEIDER

University of Cahfornia, Riverside MARYL GEARHART

University of California, Los Angeles

This critique of the literature on interaction between mentally retarded children and their parents is based on two frameworks needed for understanding family functioning: the theory of Vygotsky,which has been applied to studiesof adult-child interaction as contexts for cognitive development and which provides a way to account for the participants' goals; and the ecocultural niche framework, in which the larger context of family interaction is considered. The literature on interaction in families with retarded children is critically examined for evidence regarding econiche factors and parent-child interaction. We ask whether studies to date have looked at these families in ecoculturally valid ways or with a consideration of participants' goals. We suggest diredions for future research that would utilize the two frameworks. INTRODUCTION The majority of studies of interaction between retarded children and their mothers have reported similar results: Mothers of retarded children are more "directive" and " c o n t r o l l i n g " in interactions with their children than mothers of nonretarded children, and retarded children are less responsive and compliant to mothers than are same-age nonretarded children. These findings have been given completely different interpretations by different authors, however. Some studies have used their results to claim that mothers' behaviors are the cause of children's problems with language, problem-solving, and so forth (Kogan, WireThis paper was begun when both authors were postdoctoral trainees (NICHD Training Grant #HD07032) m the Soclo-BehavloralGroup of the MentalRetardationResearch Center, UCLA. The authors gratefullyacknowledgethe influenceof NICHD Program Project Grant #HD11944-06 and those involved in observing parent-child interactionunder it: Barbara Hecht, Harold Levine, and Ronald Galhmore. We would like to thank Cindy Bernheimer, Ronald Gallimore, Barbara Hecht, Sharon Sabsay, and Thomas Wetsner for thetr comments. Correspondence and requests for reprints should be sent to Phylhs Schneider, University of Kansas, Child Language Program, Lawrence, KS 66044.

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berger, & Bobbitt, 1969; Marshall, Hegrenes, & Goldstein, 1973); others have viewed mothers' behaviors as adapted to the child's abilities (e.g., Rondal, 1978; Spiker, 1982). The issue of whether mothers' behavior is detrimental or beneficial to the child's development is perhaps the most important question to arise from this literature. Interaction studies involving mentally retarded children and their families have tended to focus on interaction exclusively, without regard to other aspects of family functioning. Observation of these families suggests that there is a great deal of variation in the nature and success of family adjustment to a retarded child. Presumably, this variation would have an effect on the nature of interaction with the child as well. What the interaction literature lacks, to date, is an approach which would relate variations in family contexts to the ways in which family members interact with the child. Such an approach for understanding family functioning has been developed by Gallimore, Welsher, and Nihira (1984) by utilizing two existing theoretical frameworks: the developmental theory of Vygotsky (1962, 1978) and others who have extended his theory (e.g., Wertsch, 1985), and the ecocultural niche approach (Weisner, 1984; Whiting & Whiting, 1975). In this article, we provide an overview of these frameworks. We then examine the existing literature on interaction in families with retarded children for information about factors identified by the frameworks as relevant to the child's development.

Vygotsky The theoretical framework of the Soviet psychologist L. S. Vygotsky (1962, 1978) has recently been utilized by American psychologists in studies of interactions between adults and normal American children (e.g., Bernstein, 1981; Wertsch, 1979, 1985), adults and children in cultures outside the United States (Wertsch, Minick, & Arns, 1984), and adults and language-disordered children (Sammarco, 1984). This framework is motivated by the belief that the nature of interaction is a factor in the child's development, as of course are existing studies of mother-retarded child interaction; however, the Vygotskian framework, in its attention to what the adult is trying to accomplish in the interaction, offers a more principled way of explaining adult behavior in interaction than previous studies have evidenced. For Vygotsky, the focus is on the social situation in which a child learns. The child learns through participation in social interaction with more capable members of the culture in culturally defined "activity settings." A key concept of the framework is the "zone of proximal development," defined as the difference between what the child can do alone and what she or he can do with guidance. Adult guidance is most useful to the child when it occurs in the child's zone-that is, when it is beyond the child's independent abilities, but not too much. The

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adult provides overall structure and assistance to the child in everyday activities in which adult and child participate together. This process of interaction in the zone has been studied by examining the type of assistance provided by adults dnring the course of an activity, either a problem-solving task (e.g., Wertsch, McNamee, McLane, & Budwig, 1980) or a task based on "everyday" activities (Rogoff & Gardner, 1984). Related changes in the child's abilities to assume responsibility for aspects of the activity is also examined. In interaction, the adult provides assistance at a level from which the child can benefit at a particular point in joint activity. When the child is successful, the adult provides "abbreviated" assistance, which provides minimal direction and leaves maximal responsibility to the child for that portion of the activity (e.g., "What do we need next?"). When such assistance is not responded to appropriately by the child, the adult typically switches to "unabbreviated" help which provides more specific direction (e.g., "Do you think the small block would go on top of that big one?" or demonstration); the adult is thereby assuming a greater share of the responsibility for the overall activity (Saxe, Gearhart, & Guberman, 1984; Wertsch & Schneider, 1981). Relative responsibility for the task can be determined by observing which participant, adult or child, regulated strategic substeps of the joint activity (Wertsch et al., 1980). Note that abbreviated assistance is neither better nor worse than unabbreviated assistance; rather, it is the match of level of assistance with the child's ability in relation to what the participants are trying to accomplish that makes assistance helpful or unhelpful. Children gradually learn how to carry out such activities independently by learning both the steps necessary to carry them out and the fact that activities are made up of such steps. The adult's role in this process is not that of teacher in the way we usually think of this role, but rather that of a joint participant in everyday activities. Parental Goals. Some attention has been given in past work to long-term parental goals and their relation to interaction with children. Vygotskians have begun to study the parents' goals for the interaction itself--their microinteractional goals. Wertsch (1985) discussed the inferred microinteractional goals of mothers in his study, he noted that the middle-class mothers he studied seemed not to be content with unabbreviated assistance for long, but continued to attempt to get the child to understand the task as a whole by returning to abbreviated assistance when the child was successful. That is, their primary goal seemed to be to foster independent functioning, which they implemented by attempting to shift responsibility for the task to the child whenever possible. Adults' goals for an activity may be expected to vary according to how they define the situation, this in turn will depend on the activity setting in Which interaction takes place. In a study comparing Brazilian mother-child and teach-

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er-child dyads (Wertsch et al., 1984), for example, mothers appeared to focus on getting the task completed quickly and efficiently, whereas the teachers seemed to want the child to do as much of the task as possible on his or her own, as Wertsch (1985) had found with American middle-class mothers. These goals presumably are related to the activity settings in which the adult typically interacts with the child; the Brazilian mothers engage in everyday tasks in which learning takes place but is not the primary goal for the activity, whereas teachers are involved explicitly in activities in which learning is the primary goal. The type of assistance varied accordingly in the two groups: Brazilian mothers used more unabbreviated direction with which they retained responsibility for the overall activity, whereas teachers provided help that shifted as much responsibility to the child as the child could handle. Such variations in goals and assistance have also been described in studies of interaction between expert and apprentice in everyday activity settings in other cultures (e.g., Greenfield, 1984). Vygotsky's approach provides direction for observing and interpreting mothers' behavior as well as children's functioning. In research on mothers' interactions with retarded children, the common strategy, comparing types of utterances ( " imperatives" vs. ' 'questions," etc.) or frequencies o f ' 'directive" behavior in target versus comparison mothers, cannot produce sufficient information to interpret either the mother's behavior or the child's functioning. The Vygotskian approach would suggest looking first at what the adult is trying to accomplish in the interaction and then at the adult's behavior in relation to the child's performance in the task. In order to get a complete picture of activity settings and parental goals, however, we need information about the ecocultural niche in which these settings and goals occur. The Ecoculturai Niche In the ecocultural niche framework, to understand the context in which interaction among family members takes place, we must look at the characteristics of the family's ecocultural niche. This framework was developed by anthropologists for the cross-cultural study of child development (Weisner, 1984; Whiting & Whiting, 1975) to account for families' adaptations to various factors over which families have only partial control. These factors constitute the family's ecocultural niche. The process of family adaptation to econiche variables has been termed accommodation (Gallimore, Weisner, & Nihira, 1984). Those working within the econicbe approach agree with researchers such as Farber (1975) and Turnbull and Turnbull (1986) on the necessity of looking at families as a system. A number of domains of ecocultural niche factors have been identified as cross-culturally relevant to child development, grouped by Weisner (1984) into five clusters of related variables. One cluster influences the personnel likely to be around children and what those people are likely to be doing; Weisner includes in

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this set the variables of daily routines, child-care tasks, and children's play groups. A second, related cluster involves the status of women and includes variables such as whether mother, father, or other person is primary caretaker for the child, involvement in support groups, and other family members' roles in caretaking. A third important cluster covers "cultural alternatives" available in the community, including sources of "stimulation" for the child (toys, books, television), programs outside the home for the child, parents' sources of information concerning child care, and the availability of novel or alternative ideas about child rearing. The other two clusters are: features of the econiche that affect the health and mortality of family members, and subsistence and provision of food and shelter. When considering families with a mentally retarded child, we can further specify some of the econiche factors described above. Daily routines, for example, are often altered by special care routines required by a handicapped child. Relevant to the cultural alternatives cluster, these families are likely to have a unique set of sources of information on child rearing, such as intervention programs for the child (which may include some kind of parent training), and special support groups for parents of mentally retarded or otherwise handicapped children; these are sources of alternative beliefs about and goals for raising a child with special problems. The factors described by Weisner (1984) were developed to account for families with normally developing children. In the case of families with a retarded child, it is also necessary to consider characteristics of the retarded child, such as level of cognitive and linguistic functioning, presence of behavior problems, and so forth, to be part of the family's ecocultural niche, insofar as these characteristics affect interaction with the child. Ecocultural niche fa~.tors operating in a particular family affect the pattern of everyday activities in the home in which interaction among family members takes place. Parental work schedules, for example, will influence the types and number of activity settings in which parents and children jointly participate; parental views of child development will affect the nature of interaction during the activity; advice from professionals may in turn influence parents' views of child development. Econiche variables also enable us to infer the origins of parental beliefs about and goals for the child's development. For example, sources of information about normal and delayed development that have been available to parents, such as through higher education or intervention programs, may be expected to influence parental beliefs about development, which in turn will affect the goals parents set for the retarded child. Other factors such as the child's current level of functioning and the financial resources of the family will also affect the family's beliefs and/or goals. Ecocultural niche variables may be viewed as "constraints and opportunities" to which families adapt (Weisner, 1984). Families have partial control

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over how they adapt to these variables. Faced with a child who needs extra care, for example, parents may opt either to keep one parent at home or to hire someone to come into the home or live in to provide the additional care. These decisions still must be based on the constraints and opportunities of such econiche variables as income, community norms about who should provide child care, and so forth. Moreover, whether imposed by circumstance or chosen by the family, econiche variables will still exert an influence on aspects of family functioning, such as amount of time spent in interaction with the child, and so on. 1

SES as an Econiche Variable. Socioeconomic status (SES) is frequently controlled for in psychological research in an attempt to limit some of the variation described above. SES is actually a "package" of other factors (income, level of education, etc.) and obscures factors such as domestic workload, marital roles, or parental beliefs and values which may be better explanations of variations in child outcomes (Whiting, 1976). A variable such as SES correlates with child outcome only to the degree that it correlates with the ecocultural factors that affect family functioning and therefore child outcome. Synthesis. The combination of the ecocultural niche and Vygotskian frameworks is more powerful than either approach alone. Observation of a family's econiche reveals factors that influence availability of adults for interaction and the activity settings in which interaction is likely to take place. Vygotskian analyses help us to see how adults and children interact in these settings. The econiche approach allows identification of factors that may affect development, but to determine their effect it is necessary to see how they are realized in face-toface interaction with the child. Variables that are not realized in contact with the child may in fact not affect development; for example, parents may have the goal for the child to live independently some day, but unless this goal is translated into interaction, for example, the fostering of self-help skills by requiring the child to help out in the home, the goal is unlikely to have as great an effect on the child's development. 1Readers may wonder about the relation of the term accommodation to the Piagetian terms accommodation and assimilation. Families both shape and adapt to the ecocultural niche, that Is, both assimilation and accommodauon in the Piagetian sense occur. Sometimes it is difficult to separate the two factors, however. Employment outside the home, for example, represents assimilation in the sense that the child's requirements for care are adapted to the parents' need to work; the actual working hours, however, may have been adjusted to accommodate the child's schedule of programs. In many cases, it is easier to observe accommodations to the child than assimilation of the child; often, assimilations may be described as situations that did not require accommodations, for example, the child's needs (in relation to the family's resources) did not require such extreme accommodations as one or both parents quitting their jobs.

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At the same time, the study of interaction by itself will not permit explanation of why it occurs the way it does without some consideration of wider cultural and familial contexts. In many of the existing studies of interaction between mothers and mentally retarded children, for example, attempts to understand the behavior of the mothers are based solely on comparisons with behavior of mothers of nondisabled children, rather than on examination of factors peculiar to their ecocultural niches. APPLICATION OF T H E F R A M E W O R K S TO EXISTING STUDIES O F FAMILY INTERACTION W I T H RETARDED CHILDREN Studies of adult-child interaction could potentially provide us with a more complete picture of the functioning of families with retarded children by describing relationships between econiche factors and the ways family members interact with mentally retarded children. The interpretation of available results from mother-retarded child interaction studies is generally made problematic, however, by the lack of any overarching framework to direct the design and interpretations of these studies (Crnic, Friedrich, & Greenberg, 1983; Marfo, 1984). Thus, we shall evaluate the studies from the perspective of the ecocultural niche and Vygotskian frameworks. As noted earlier, the majority of interaction studies have described mothers of retarded children as more directive and controlling than mothers of nonretarded children in interactions with their children, and retarded children are described as less responsive and compliant to mothers than are same-age nonretarded children. These findings have been interpreted in conflicting ways, however: mothers' behavior is viewed as either the cause of children's problems with language, problem-solving, and so forth (Kogan et al., 1969; Marshall et al., 1973) or as adapted to the child's abilities (e.g., Rondal, 1978; Spiker, 1982). In order to interpret such findings, it is necessary, to have some idea of the ecocultural niches of the families, thus, we will begin by determining what has been learned about these niches in interaction studies. We shall have two primary questions for each review section: (a) What do the studies tell us about econiche factors and interaction in these families?; and (b) did the studies look at these families in ecoculturally valid 2 ways, so that their interpretations can be accepted as valid? 2By "ecocultural validity" we mean an attempt to take into account factors of families' ecocultural inches in designing studies of family interaction. When considering interaction, this means that we would want to ensure that behavior elicited in structured situations is like that which occurs in natural situations, and also that such behavior actually does occur naturally, with what frequency, and so forth.

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Personnel Involved in Interaction with the Child The ecocultural niche framework suggests that it is important to know who interacts with the child and with what frequency--information obtainable by examining the daily routine of the household, parents' workload in the home, parents' outside employment, and so forth. Existing studies of interaction provide information primarily about how mothers interact with children when they are requested to, but little information about factors relating to frequency of such interaction, or about other persons who interact with the child and how they do SO.

Some authors (e.g., Marfo, 1984) have bemoaned the scarcity of fathers in the majority of interaction studies. While agreeing that fathers have been neglected in this literature, we would point out that merely including fathers in the same types of dyadic situations as mothers would not be enough to determine paternal roles in interaction. For the sake of ecocultural validity, it is necessary to examine to what degree and in what activities both mothers and fathers really do interact with their children before we can evaluate how they interact--in other words, to disentangle factors of frequency of interaction from content or quality of interaction. Activity Settings Another set of variables that the econiche and Vygotskian frameworks identify as important involve the "activity setting" in which interaction takes place. Different activity settings will be associated with different goals, which in turn will require different behaviors to implement them, and different kinds of assistance on the part of the adult. Compare, for example, the activities of play, teaching, and cleaning up; they can differ in the degree to which interaction itself is the goal, and in the degree of directiveness we might expect from the adult. Some attention has been given to the physical location of the interaction (Marfo, 1984). Frequently there is the assumption that home observations are more "natural" than laboratory settings, but in such cases, natural has been equated with physical setting rather than with activity setting (Mash, 1984). The use of highly structured tasks appears to make activity settings so similar that differences due to physical location are not apparent (Marfo, 1984). It may well be more important to attend to other aspects of the activity setting being observed, such as activities and task materials, in order to determine that observed behavior is representative of subjects' behavior in everyday settings. Activities. We have learned nothing from interaction studies about the activitie~ in which parents typically interact with retarded children. In existing studies of mother-retarded child interaction, interaction is typically observed in one of two types of structured observational situation: (a) "free play." in which parents are instructed to do whatever they would normally do at home when playing with the child; and (b) some variety of teaching task, in which parents

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are, typically, explicitly instructed to teach something. Some studies involved both free-play and teaching-task sessions, whereas others used more than one teaching task. Teaching tasks have involved such activities as teaching the child how to play with a toy, helping the child complete a puzzle, and helping the child put on shoes and socks. Reasons for choosing a teaching task as opposed to a free-play situation are not always made explicit. It might seem that free-play situations would be more representative of everyday interaction than teaching tasks. It has been suggested in the normative literature that mothers do little didactic teaching (White & Watts, 1973), that they more often help children learn in other, less direct ways (Gordon, 1976). As pointed out by Marfo (1984), however, free play can be a highly structured situation, even when it takes place in home observations; it may therefore not be much more " f r e e " than teaching tasks. Furthermore, it may be the case that parents of retarded children contribute to their children's free play in different ways than do parents of nonretarded children, as suggested by findings that parents of retarded children tend to take on a teaching role to a greater degree than parents of nonretarded children (Mash, 1984; Stoneman, Brody, & Abbott, 1983). Thus, it may be that mothers of retarded children tend to do considerable teaching regardless of context. Because there are no data on whether and how often free play situations actually occur in everyday interactions, the naturalness of this situation must also come into question. A few investigators (Eheart, 1982; Terdal, Jackson, & Garner, 1976) have asked mothers whether their own or their children's behavior during the task session was typical, but not whether the activity itself was common at home. We might expect that frequency of occurrence of joint play would covary with other ecocultural variables such as mother's domestic workload and whether both parents were employed outside of the home, and thus would vary in the degree to which it was typical for different families. Interview data about the everyday routines of families with retarded children are essential for selecting ecologically valid tasks. "Everyday" tasks, such as setting the table or putting away toys, might in many cases be good candidates for observational studies. It should be noted, however, that even such everyday tasks are subject to distortion when standardized for research purposes; for example, the use of a table-setting task with 2-year-old Down syndrome children with a 2-min time limit (as used by Buium, Rynders, & Turnure, 1974) is not likely to produce natural interaction. Care must be taken to ensure (a) that tasks are everyday ones for the subjects of the study, and (b) that they are carried out in a manner typical for these subjects. The structured situations of free play and teaching tasks may be contrasted with naturalistic observation, in which behavior is observed in everyday contexts and no task or play situation is provided by experimenters. Very few studies have utilized naturalistic observation techniques. Stoneman and Brody (1982) used both naturalistic observation and structured free-play situations; though

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only pilot data are available to date, results appear consistent across the two situations. If further research continues to reveal similar patterns of interaction across structured and unstructured contexts, we could have more confidence in results available to date from structured contexts. Nevertheless, from the perspective of the ecocultural framework, the ideal procedure would be to choose tasks for structured observation from among those first observed in naturalistic observation; in this way we could have greater confidence in the relevance of results for understanding everyday interaction. We would learn not only how parents interact, but in what activity settings. Materials. Task materials are an important part of a task situation; they may constrain the type of action and interaction that can take place. With few exceptions (e.g., Crawley & Spiker, 1983; Cunningham, Revler, BlackweU, & Deck, 1981), studies have not commented on the appropriateness of toys or other materials to the subjects' developmental level, although in a few cases (e.g., Buium et al., 1974) at least a list of task materials was provided. Buckhalt, Rutherford, and Goldberg (1978) used a task which they had considered to be appropriate for the age range of their subjects, but in fact they found that it was more difficult for their retarded subjects. In only a few studies was it reported that attempts were made in advance to ensure that tasks or task materials were suitable for the retarded subjects (Filler & Bricker, 1976; Spiker, 1982). Use of a task inappropriate to a child's developmental level clearly makes a mother's task more difficult. In Vygotskian terms, it would be difficult to engage a child in the zone of his or her proximal development if the task materials were beyond the zone. A study by Cook and Culp (1981) suggested that mothers of retarded children are aware of the level of toys appropriate for their children; mothers chose the same toys for their Down syndrome infants as did mothers of nonretarded infants matched on cognitive and linguistic measures. When provided only with developmentally inappropriate materials, however, the mother of a retarded child is presumably faced with a choice: She can encourage either age- or level-appropriate behavior by her child. A mother could choose, for example, to use task materials in a developmentally appropriate way with her child--for example, she could allow a low-functioning child to bang or suck on a set of blocks rather than encourage building. In an experimental setting, however, she may be particularly concerned with getting the child to play in an ageappropriate manner. Matching comparison children on developmental level would not duplicate this dilemma of the mother of the retarded child. Scant evidence exists on mothers' strategies in experimental situations. In noting that Down syndrome children had more trouble than nonretarded children in their study, Buckhalt et al. (1978) also noted that mothers of the Down syndrome children seemed to be "trying harder," which suggests that these mothers were in fact attempting to help children play in age-appropriate ways. Note that mothers of normal children are faced either with no such discrepancy or a discrepancy in the other direction; that is, the child's level is either the same or

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higher than age level. At this point, given the lack of information about task materials in many studies, we can only guess at the actual role of level-appropriateness of materials; we hope that in future studies these materials are at least better specified, and preferably are chosen with level appropriateness in mind.

How Parents and Retarded Children Interact, and How to Interpret this Behavior How Parents Interact Compared to Whom. Comparison groups of nonretarded children have been selected by a variety of criteria, including chronological age (CA), mental age (MA), and "mean length of utterance" (MLU, or the average length in morphemes of the child's utterances); the criterion utilized can have a marked effect on the interpretation of differences between groups (Marfo, 1984; Rondal, 1978; Spiker, 1982). In our view, not one of the matching measures used to date provides a completely satisfactory match. The inadequacy of CA matching for most purposes has been frequently noted (e.g., Marfo, 1984). Mental-age scores may not be the ideal alternative; as Rondal (1978) pointed out, children may attain the same MA score based on different patterns of strengths and weaknesses, making interpretations of group differences on the target variable problematic. Unmeasured child variables that vary independently of the matching criterion and that have impact on parent-child interaction are not recognized; Keogh and Kopp (1982), for example, found that though behavior problems occurred in their sample of retarded children, they were not correlated with the retarded children's MAs. Thus, matching on MA does not guarantee that children will participate in interactions in similar ways. Linguistic differences have been reported among retarded and nonretarded groups matched on MLU, such as higher vocabulary (Rondal, 1978; Ryan, 1975), lower phonological development (Ryan, 1975), and higher communicative competence (Liefer & Lewis, 1984) of retarded or Down syndrome children versus their MLU-matched peers. These differences illustrate that retarded and normal children at the " s a m e " cognitive or linguistic level, being different ages, will have different levels of skill in areas other than the specific skill matched. When we take into consideration the factors identified by the ecocultural approach as being unique to families with a handicapped child, the list of differences between experimental and comparison groups grows enormously. For example, experience' with intervention programs, expressly designed to change the child's and/or the parents' behavior, is found almost exclusively in families with handicapped or at-risk children. 3 Thus, if we are to understand how niche factors and interaction are related in families with retarded children, we will need 3Although it might seem that this charactenzaUon of intervention programs would also fit programs designed to enhance normal cognitive development, such as the Better Baby Institute, there are obvious differences in motivation, expected outcome, and so forth, that make these programs very different.

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to turn from exclusive reliance on comparisons with "normal" dyads to observations of individual variation in parents' interactional style to see what best facilitates retarded children's development. Crawley and Spiker (1983) have demonstrated that individual differences in maternal interactional style are related in different ways to characteristics of the Down syndrome child. They used a rating scale that distinguished among directiveness, intrusiveness, and sensitivity in mothers' behavior to code interaction segments involving mothers and 2-year-old Down syndrome children. Directiveness was unrelated to the child's developmental score and varied independently of sensitivity, stimulation, and expression of positive affect; it was, however, correlated with children's relative lack of interest in the play situation and infrequency of initiated actions on objects, suggesting that directive mothers had children in need of direction. Certain clusters of variables, such as directiveness combined with high sensitivity, were associated with higher functioning children. This approach makes it clear that directiveness has not been adequately defined or distinguished from other qualities in previous studies. The findings suggest that directiveness as Crawley and Spiker define it may in fact have beneficial effects on child outcome, a suggestion that still remains to be verified through longitudinal studies.

Behavior of the Child. As stated earlier, we are considering the characteristics of the retarded child to be a variable of the family's ecocultural niche. Because most of these characteristics (language, behavior problems, etc.) are manifested in behavior, and because child behavior affects adult behavior in interaction (Bell, 1968), it is necessary to pay attention to the child's behavior, as well as the mother's, in the interaction. When child behaviors have been coded (whether contingently or not), it has generally been found that retarded infants and children are less responsive than chronological-age-matched comparison children. Down syndrome infants have been found to do less referential looking (Gunn, Berry, & Andrews, 1982) and to be less vocal during the first 4 months of life (Berger & Cunningham, 1983). Down syndrome children have been found to be less contingent in mother-child dialogues (Buckhalt et al., 1978); Jones (1980) found the same to be true with Down syndrome infants, even when compared to a younger group of normal infants. Retarded children have been found to be less responsive to their mothers (Cunningham et al., 1981; Stoneman et al., 1983) and to initiate fewer interactions (Vietze, Abernathy, Ashe, & Faulstich, 1978; Terdal et al., 1976). Among Down syndrome children, this factor is compounded by a high incidence of hypotonia (low muscle tone) in infancy, resulting in an appearance of unresponsiveness and low affect expression (Cicchetti & Sroufe, 1976). Thus, the mother of a retarded child is faced with lower levels of responsiveness, compliance, and interaction initiation for a longer period than is the mother of a nonretarded child. How Parents Interact with Retarded Children. As noted earlier, the majority of studies have found that mothers of retarded children, as compared to mothers

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of same-age nonretarded children, tend to be more directive in interactions with their children. When matching criteria other than chronological age were used, however, many of these differences disappear. Mothers' directiveness has been found to be correlated with the mental age of the child; children with low-level MAs, whether developmentally delayed or normal, received more directives from their mothers (Terdal et al., 1976; Vietze et al., 1978). Thus directiveness does not seem to imply "insensitivity" to the child. Indeed, Crawley and Spiker (1983) found that mothers of retarded children who rated high on directiveness in their study were not necessarily rated low on sensitivity, and that, in fact, almost half of these mothers were rated as "highly sensitive" to their children's cues. We may conclude, therefore, that mothers' directiveness appears to be a response to the child's level of functioning in the interaction. Supporting the view of mother's behavior as a response to the child's level are studies of mothers' linguistic behavior, which has been shown to be responsive to the retarded children's linguistic level. In a study of mothers and Down syndrome infants, Buckhalt et al. (1978) found that mothers' mean length of utterance (MLU) was correlated with the mental-age score of the infant, whether Down syndrome or normal. Rondal (1978) found that mothers of both Down syndrome and normal children adjusted to the child's MLU in terms of wordfrequency, lexical, syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and language-teaching measures; the "linguistic environment" provided by mothers of Down syndrome children did not differ from that provided by mothers of nonretarded children. Thus, in analyses of linguistic as well as cognitive variables, mothers of retarded children were responding to the child's level of functioning rather than to the child's age or to the condition of retardation. Despite the responsiveness of their mothers, it is still the case that retarded children are faced with different behavior on the part of adults than are same-age nonretarded children. Stoneman and her colleagues (Stoneman & Brody, 1982; Stoneman et al., 1983) have described the maternal behavior, in previous studies and in their own, in terms of roles that mothers adopt. They described the roles of mothers of Down syndrome children as primarily "manager," "teacher," and "helper," in contrast to parents of same-aged nonretarded children who in their studies tended to be "egalitarian" in interactions with their children. It seems likely that the behavior that resulted in ascription of "manager," "teacher" or "helper" roles to these mothers is similar to that which in other studies was called "directiveness." The difference is that describing the behavior in terms of roles begins to take into account the parents' immediate goals for the interaction. Note that these "directive" roles did not indicate insensitivity; mothers and fathers of Down syndrome children were contingently responsive to their children's information seeking and management attempts significantly more often than were parents of nonretarded children (Stoneman et al., 1983). Mash and his associates (reported in Mash, 1984) have studied normal, hyperactive, and mentally retarded children interacting with their mothers; in a preliminary analysis, Mash (1984) noted that although mothers of both hyperactive and retarded children exhibited more control and were more directive in a structured task than

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were mothers of normal children, they differed in that mothers of retarded children were also more directive in a free-play task. They interpreted this difference to mean that the mothers of retarded children had adopted the role of teacher in both observed settings and thus were being directive for very different reasons than were the mothers of hyperactives. Thus, mothers of retarded children in Mash et al.'s study, as well as those in Stoneman et al.'s studies, appeared to have a different view of their role in interaction than mothers of same-aged nonretarded children. Again, because children were matched by age, it is not clear whether this different view is based on the child's developmental level or on his/ber status as mentally retarded. These results were obtained in studies comparing mothers of retarded children to other groups of mothers; we would again like to point out that individual variation in mothers' behavior is certainly present within these groups of mothers (Crawley & Spiker, 1983), and that this variation is in need of study. How Fathers and Siblings Interact with Retarded Children. For the most part, interaction studies of families with retarded children have observed only mother-child dyads. Stoneman and Brody (1982; Stoneman et al., 1983) have attempted to broaden this narrow focus by including father-child dyads, motherfather-child triads, and sibling interactions. They found that although mothers and fathers interacted similarly with Down syndrome children in dyadic structured task situations, fathers tended to take more of a "playmate" role in both triadic structured play interactions and naturalistic observation situations; mothers tended to be "teachers," "managers" and "helpers" in all situations. Stoneman and Brody (1982) noted that these parental role differences are not unique to families with retarded children but are also found in families without handicapped children. Stoneman and Brody (1982) also examined sibling interaction. They observed older, nonretarded siblings interacting in a structured task and in a naturalistic observation situation and found that the older, nonretarded siblings assumed manager and teacher roles toward the younger Down syndrome siblings much more frequently than did the Down siblings toward them. The Down siblings complied with the older siblings' "management attempts" at a lower rate than they had to those by parents. Unfortunately, the authors have not yet systematically compared these data with those from their previous studies of sibling interaction in normal families, nor have they observed interactions of older Down-younger nonretarded siblings, making it difficult to interpret the findings. It would be interesting to see whether siblings interact differently with the retarded sibling than with younger nonretarded siblings, and what the range of variation in interactional styles is for siblings across families. It appears then that to some degree fathers and siblings behave similarly to mothers in dyadic interaction with retarded children--that is, they take on directive roles. Further studies of interaction between the retarded child and all family members are needed.

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Interpreting Parental Behavior in Interaction Directiveness as Adaptation. From a Vygotskian perspective, it would seem that parents of retarded children would be seriously out of phase with their children's behavior if they interacted in exactly the same ways as mothers of agematched nonretarded children. Some authors characterize the interactions of mothers and retarded children as "asynchronous" (e.g., Crnic et al., 1983). We suggest that this asynchrony may be necessary if interaction is to take place at all in these dyads. If mothers of retarded children responded at the same low level as their children's behavior, they then could be described as "in synchrony," but this is obviously not desirable--they would be at their children's actual level of development rather than in the zone of their proximal development. Similarly, aiming too high, for example, by providing subtle cues in lieu of directiveness, would also not be in the zone and would not be useful to the child. In fact, the "asynchrony" is only an exaggeration of the division of responsibility for joint activity found in dyads with same-aged nonretarded children. The interactive style of these mothers appears to be adaptive; that is, when directiveness occurs, it is compensating for the children's unresponsiveness and lack of initiation, and it may enable retarded children to become engaged with mothers. The mother of a retarded child would presumably be working harder than would the mother of a same-age nonretarded child to keep the child involved and in the zone of proximal development in an experimental task. In other words, she would appear more "directive" and "controlling" because her child required more direction. This interpretation is consistent with findings from studies which gave some attention to the functions of mothers' directives in interactions. For example, Spiker (1982) found that mothers of low-functioning Down syndrome children had to spend more time orienting the chdd to the task than mothers of highfunctioning Down syndrome children; at the same time, low-functioning Down syndrome children were less likely to be attentive following orienting directives. In other words, it was the difficult-to-engage child whose mother spent more time trying to engage him or her. Liefer and Lewis (1984) reported that retarded children in their study showed low responsiveness in general to their mothers' questions, but were more likely to respond to directive questions than to other types. These studies suggest that directiveness is adaptive for these dyads. Adaptive or Maladaptive? It has been suggested that directiveness may have both adaptive and maladaptive aspects. Stern (1977) has hypothesized that the "intrusiveness" of mothers of retarded children represents attempts to increase children's responsiveness; it may be beneficial to the extent that it accomplishes this, but it may also decrease the development of self-regulatory processes of initiation and exploration. In Vygotskian terms, it might delay the transfer from interpersonal to independent functioning. Stern suggests the possibility that the child's behavior and slowness in acquiring skills might have a cumulative effect on interaction; that is, the mother would become less willing to interact with her

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child. 4 Thus far, no direct evidence for Stem's view has emerged from the interaction literature. It may well be difficult to sort out whether interaction patterns create an impoverished learning environment for the child, or whether in fact the mother is limiting the environment in order to keep it within the zone of her child's proximal development and is thus creating an optimal environment for her child. Again, longitudinal studies and attention to individual differences are needed to determine the long-term effects of different patterns of interaction on both mother's and retarded child's behavior and on the child's development.

Long.Term Effects. In order to determine the effects of interaction on child development, it is necessary to observe the parent's behavior at an earlier date than the child characteristics that are of interest; if both are observed only at one point in time, the direction of effects is impossible to determine (Rondal, 1985). In the literature on interaction between mothers and retarded children, there has been an exclusive reliance on cross-sectional methods to the exclusion of longitudinal designs (Crnic et al., 1983). From cross-sectional data alone, we cannot determine the direction of effects of parents' behavior on children, children's behavior on mothers, or interactive effects. A longitudinal design would make it possible to learn not only how family members interact but the relation between the nature of interaction and child outcome. Parental Goals and Beliefs Parental goals for and beliefs about their retarded children's development have not been directly investigated in interaction studies. Given the many concerns unique to families of retarded children, we would expect to find that parents of retarded children have different concerns during both testing and everyday interaction than parents of nondisabled children. Both long-term goals and immediate-task goals are likely to differ, both types having an impact on the way the parents interact with their retarded children.

Long.Term Goals and Beliefs. Parents' long-term goals for their retarded children may well vary according to the children's abilities; a family may choose to concentrate on self-help, social or academic skills at a particular point in the child's development. The family's long-term goals can help us understand family members' short-term goals in the observed interactive setting. Long-term goals have been studied in relation to interaction in the nonretarded population (e.g., Harkness & Super, 1977). To date, the only source of evidence regarding parentad goals for retarded children are the studies previously reviewed that discuss 'tit may be the case that mothers become less willing to act as a teacher with their retarded children, while remaining willing to interact in other ways. In Gearhart's interview study (1984), mothers of older, retarded children expressed a wish to leave teaching to the schools and to "just enjoy" the children.

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parents' behavior in terms of roles (Mash, 1984; Stoneman & Brody, 1982; Stoneman et al., 1983). Parents of retarded children may be likely to believe that mentally retarded children require more direction in order to develop. Some mothers in Gearhart's interview study (1984) stated that without their constant intervention their retarded children would not have reached major developmental milestones, while their nonretarded siblings learned with virtually no adult assistance. Mothers' teaching behavior described in some studies (e.g., Stoneman & Brody, 1982) may well reflect such consciously held beliefs. Whether or not their assessment of delayed children's course of development is accurate, mothers' beliefs in the need for constant assistance may help explain findings in interaction studies that mothers are more directive.

Parents' Microinteractional Goals. Research studies in adult--MR child interaction have not examined adults' conceptions of the experimental task and setting. It is not at all clear that parents of retarded and normal children have similar conceptions of the task situation. One way in which mothers of retarded children may differ in their immediate goals on a task from comparison group mothers is in their concern with ageappropriate behavior. As noted earlier, mothers could choose to foster either ageor developmental-level-appropriate behavior in their retarded children. Such a goal may well result in a higher degree of directiveness on a mother's part than if her goal were to foster independent performance--a goal frequently mentioned by middle-class mothers of nonretarded children (Wertsch et al., 1980). The Family's Interaction History as a Variable An important factor likely to influence parents' behavior in interactions with their retarded children is the family's history of intervention by professionals. Due to Public Law 94-142, which mandated programs and services for handicapped children and involvement of their parents in planning educational programs, funding and incentive has become available for professional intervention in families with mentally retarded children. Since then, it appears as though few families of children identified as retarded fail to receive professional assistance; certainly it is likely that any family that can be identified and signed up by a research study would also have been identified by and involved with intervention programs. Many intervention programs have defined the mother's role as that of teacher, therapist, or educator of the child (Spiker, 1982). Some programs aim at modifying the ways in which the mother interacts with her child; others not specifically focusing on changing interaction involve the mother in at-home teaching and reinforcement activities. Thus, it is not surprising that mothers of retarded children take on the role of teacher in structured experimental interactions. Both the behaviors targeted for change and the methods employed to change

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them vary greatly across these programs. A program may involve behavior modification techniques to increase child compliance (e.g., Christophersen, Barnard, Barnard, Gleeson, & Sykes, 1981), or language training of the mother to change the linguistic input to the child (e.g., Seitz & Marcus, 1976), or training in responsiveness and warmth (Bromwich, 1981). It could be predicted that some types of programs would foster less flexible, "recipe" methods of interacting, whereas others which emphasize responsiveness would promote flexible and contingent behavior. Thus, these families are most likely to differ in intervention experience not only from families without mentally retarded children, who receive no intervention, but also among themselves. 5 Parents' experiences in parent training may lead them to confuse experimenters with professionals, and thus, to become more anxious than comparison groups about being tested and evaluated as parents. Whether a family is receiving intervention and what kind of program they are involved in, therefore, would appear to be very important information to know when studying interaction in families with retarded children. Spiker (1982) noted that intervention experience is generally ignored or considered to be insignificant in studies involving Down syndrome children. Only one study has taken intervention experience into account in design, and one in interpretation of results. In Rondal's study (1978), mothers who had been involved in parent-training programs emphasizing language training were ruled out as subjects. Beckwith (1976), having found that mothers of at-risk infants held them more than comparison mothers held their normal children, suggests that the mothers of at-risk infants may have been encouraged to hold their infants more in intervention programs, although this possibility was not pursued in her study. Given the pattern of findings that parents of retarded children tend to adopt a teacher role (or are more directive for whatever reason), it is important to know whether this directiveness is a more or less natural adaptation to having a retarded child, or whether it is something that has been primarily motivated and encouraged by participation in intervention programs. CONCLUSIONS To date, there has been little concern in the literature on mother-retarded child interaction for integrating information on interaction with other aspects of family functioning. We have suggested that the ecocultural niche framework enables us to identify the niche factors that shape the everyday activity settings at home in which parents and children interact. Vygotsky's theoretical framework offers SL. Bernheimer(personal communication, 1985) has pointed out that the type of program a family is likelyto receivedependson the SES of the farmly, as well as on the child's age on entry, and that, thus, these differencesare furtherconfounded.

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insight into how these factors are translated into actual interaction between parent and child. Studies of interaction between parents and mentally retarded children have provided some information on how mothers behave in certain structured situations in comparison to mothers of nonretarded children. Interpretation of differences in behavior has been made difficult because of a dearth of information about ecocultural niche variables that affect how, how often, and why parents interact with their children. To the extent that differences in these mothers' behavior are genuine and not artifacts of research methods, we believe that such differences are explainable in terms of special problems that parents encounter m attempting to interact with their retarded children (low responsiveness and initiation, etc.) and differences in parents' beliefs about and goals for their retarded children's development. A number of crucial ecocultural niche factors that could illuminate parents' interaction with retarded children have not yet been adequately investigated, inchding parents' goals and beliefs concerning their retarded children, parents' beliefs about their own roles, and characteristics of family organization such as amount of time available for interactions, typical daily routine, and so on, which need to be related to variations in parent-retarded child interaction. We recommend that future research examine (a) individual differences among parents' interactive styles with their retarded children, (b) in relation to factors identified as relevant by the ecocultural niche approach, (c) in ecoculturally valid activity settings, (d) longitudinally, and (e) with the goal of finding out which interactional environments are related to which child outcomes. REFERENCES Beckwith, L. (1976). Caregtver-infant interaction and the development of the high risk infant. In T.D. Tjossen (Ed.), Intervention strategies for high risk mfunts and young children. Baltimore: University Park Press. Bell, R.Q. (1968). A reinterpretation of the direction of effects in studies of socialization Psychologzcal Review, 75, 81-95 Belsky, J. (1979). The effects of context on mother-child interaction. A complex Issue Quarterly Newsletter of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition, 1(3), 29-31. Berger, J., & Cunnmgham, C.C. (1983). Development of early vocal behaviors and interactions in Down's syndrome and nonhandicapped infant-mother pairs. Developmental Psychology, 19, 322-331. Bernstein, L. (1981). Language as a product of dialogue Discourse Processes, 4, 117-147. Brody, G.H., Stoneman, Z., & MacKinnon, C. (1982). Role asymmetries m interactions between school-aged children, their younger siblings, and their friends. Child Development, 53, 1364-1370. Bromwich, R.M. (1981). Working with parents and infants: An interactional approach. Baltimore. University Park Press. Buckhalt, J.A., Rutherford, R B., & Goldberg, K.E (1978). Verbal and nonverbal interaction of

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