Early Parenting Issues
How does the nature and quality of parenting that a child experiences early in life affect how she functions later in life? That is a central issue when trying to understanding the role of early experience in psychological and behavioral development. As it turns out, investigating the topic of whether experiences had early in life exert an enduring influence on how a child functions later in life is not just fundamentally important and interesting but rather challenging. In an ideal world, at least an ideal scientific--even if ethically horrible--one, the task would be rather straightfoward: Simply decide, on a random basis, that some children will be parented, for instance, in a warm, sensitive, emotionally supportive and intellectually stimulating manner and that others will be cared for in just the opposite way. Then follow the children up at a later age and make comparisons between them. Any differences would be attributable to effects of early rearing.
