There is good consensus that the developmental sciences are foundational to the practice and science of child and adolesceni psychiatry. Nonetheless, we are poorly schooled in developmental studies. A look back to the early years of the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry reveals thai many investigators studied development and seriously considered the mother-infant interaction as vital to an understanding of future pathology Indeed, our second editor, Eveoleen Rexford and colleagues,1 compiled a Journal Reader, separately published under the rubric, Infant Psychiatry. Four of these articles2"5 printed previously in the Journal from 1963 to 1971 seem prescient of an aim currently in vogue to determine the developmental course of those born under so-called normal circumstances in contrast to those infants who carry the burden of risk factors related tc genetic loading or unusual variations in maternal care. Bowlby's study6 of abandoned children during the second World War had just been published and Spitz's study7 of orphanage care ended witr the dictum that there was no substitute for mothering, later to be called parenting, to cover the broader possibilities of care-taking.
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