rd children vary widely, ranging from restrictiveness to permissiveness, warmth to hostility, and anxious involvement to calm detachment. These variations in attitudes produce different patterns in family relationships. Children may or may not come into this world with a certain hard-wired personality, but it is abundantly clear that whatever inclinations children have toward one type of personality or another is fundamentally and dramatically influenced by the ways in which their parents and other caregivers interact with them (Trawick-Smith, 1999, p. 7).
Parental hostility and permissiveness, for example, are associated with highly aggressive, noncompliant children. Warm, restrictive behavior by parents is associated with dependent, polite, and obedient children. Punishment techniques also influence behavior. For example, parents who often use physical punishment tend to have children who rank above average in their use of physical aggression. It appears, then, that one of the ways children acquire patterns of behavior is by imitating their parents and this is certainly true of emotional responses as well (Caplan & Caplan, 1984, p. 24).
This paper looks in general at the development of children between the ages of two and six to test the hypothesis that children are more likely to develop emotionally he
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