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Social competence emerges mainly from experience in close relationships. Experience in both vertical and horizontal relationships is necessary for optimum growth. These two types of relationships serve somewhat different functions in the child’s development and emerge at somewhat different times. The quality of these relationships affects the child in more or less enduring ways.

Among the most significant advances of the last quarter century is an improved understanding of social relationships and their developmental significance. Although early students of child development were thoroughly convinced that enduring relationships are important to the development of children, it was not until recently that relationships were systematically studied. Recent investigators owe much to their earlier colleagues, especially Sigmund Freud and Charles Cooley, for the theoretical formulations underpinning their endeavors. It was Freud and his co-workers who, beginning at the turn of the century, advanced a set of notions about the importance of attachments in human growth and development that has proved particularly generative (Freud, 1914/1957). Together with subsequent advances in cognitive and comparative psychology, these notions continue to inform us about relationships, their childhood origins, and their significance.

Recent studies have suggested that a child’s effectiveness in dealing with the social world emerges largely from experience in close relationships. In these contexts language emerges; so does a repertoire for coordinating one’s actions with those of others, one’s knowledge of oneself, and much of one’s knowledge about the world. Relationships may affect these acquisitions because the child spends so much time with significant others. In addition, the transactions a child has within close relationships may also have special significance.

Experience in two major kinds of relationships seems to be necessary to the child’s development. First, children must form vertical attachments, that is, attachments to individuals who have greater knowledge and social power than they do. These relationships, most commonly involving children and adults, encompass a wide variety of interactions among which complementary exchanges are especially salient. For example, adult actions toward children consist mainly of nurturance or controlling behaviors, whereas children’s actions toward adults consist mainly...