Child Development

less likely to explore the environment than American
infants. Based on these data and using the Japanese
culture as an example, Fred Rothbaum and his col-
leagues offered a critique of the universality of attach-
ment that focused on cultural variations in caregiver
sensitivity and child competence.

Rothbaum and his colleagues argued that care-
giver sensitivity in Japan is a function of parents’ ef-
forts to maintain high levels of emotional closeness
with their children, but that in the United States it is
a function of parents’ efforts to balance emotional
closeness with children’s assumed need to become
self-sufficient. In fact, Japanese parents spend more
time in close contact with their infants than parents
in the United States. Regardless, most attachment re-
searchers now agree that caregiver sensitivity is only
one important contributor to attachment security. In
all cultures, other factors such as how much stimula-
tion parents provide their children, as well as child
characteristics such as temperament, are likely to in-
fluence the development of attachment.

The link between attachment security and child
competence has also received scrutiny from a cross-
cultural perspective. Child characteristics that are as-
sociated with security in Western cultures, such as in-
dependence, emotional openness, and sociability, are
less valued in other cultures. Attachment security may
lead to social behaviors that vary across cultures but
are nonetheless adaptive in context. For example,
Japanese secure children may be more likely than
Western secure children to depend on others to meet
personal needs, because interpersonal dependency is
valued in the Japanese culture. In other words, the
characteristics of child competence may differ across
cultures as a result of culture-specific pressures.

See also: AINSWORTH, MARY DINSMORE SALTER;
BOWLBY, JOHN; PARENT-CHILD RELATIONSHIPS

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Kathleen McCartney

Eric Dearing

ATTENTION DEFICIT

HYPERACTIVITY DISORDER

Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) be-

gins in early childhood and has a significant impact

ATTENTION DEFICIT HYPERACTIVITY DISORDER 37