Mother-Toddler Interaction: A Perspective on Studying the Development of Competence.

The work on which I am reporting represents an attempt to link the evolution of interactive competence between the mother and her growing child with that child's subsequent competence in dealing with his world. Note that two different sets of connotations of the notion of competence are involved here. In its first use I intend to evoke a fundamental fact of development: that unless irreparably damaged, the growing organism will necessarily move towards successively more differentiated and organized modes of interacting with all aspects of its environment—that by its very nature it will seek to be come progressively more competent in sustaining its own develop ment. For the second use I have a very different referent in mind, namely, that elusive set of attitudes and expectations which enable some individuals to perceive in the necessities of coping a satisfying opportunity to expand their own effectiveness—and so, to reaffirm their own sense of competence. In the one instance I am speaking of developmental process, in the other about differences among individ uals: the very long range goal of my project is someday to allow a precise definition of both these meanings of "competence" and of their evolution in a variety of domains. The immediate problem is to develop and operationalize a method for effective research on such issues. Making recourse to as yet limited data derived from observations of interaction in ten mother-toddler pairs during informal playgroups conducted towards the beginning, the middle, and the end of the child's second year of life, this presen tation aims to articulate the effects of adopting a particular perspec tive from which study is to proceed. Three considerations have contributed the main impetus in shap ing the approach I shall be developing. The first is a consequence of a growing conviction that although we do have enough systematic knowledge to have gained a sense of important parameters, we are a long ways from being able to define constructs with any certainty as to the limits of their validity and even further away from determining