ABSTRACT
Children who enter child care as infants face a somewhat different set of developmental tasks in the mastery of social communication than do infants whose primary social partners are adults and older siblings. Adults and older siblings create a framework or scaffold that the infant can use to construct meaningful social communication (Schaffer 1984). Older, more expert social partners may interpret the infant’s social bids, often providing social meaning for what may not have been an intentional social bid from the infant. By others behaving as if the infant’s bid were social, the infant becomes enmeshed in a matrix of social communication. These early experiences with more experienced and thus more expert social partners may facilitate the social communication of infants once they encounter partners as novice as themselves (Lamb and Nash 1989).
