Aggression,crying and physical contact in one-to three-year-old children

In a longitudinal study in which 59 first-born middle class children were observed in the company of other children of the same age and with their mothers, a high frequency of attacks on other children by children nearly two years old was correlated with absent or delayed response by the mother to the child's crying after falls, etc. Other aspects of mother's or child's behaviour were examined but all failed to explain away this correlation. Some routes by which the correlation could have arisen from immediate influences of the child's behaviour upon the mother were also excluded. Thus it was not true that “tough” kids fight a lot and stop crying quickly. Nor did mothers respond less to children who cried often.