Misunderstandings of African-American infant attachments are likely if evaluative standards derived from infant caregiving in traditional white middle-class culture and an external point of view are employed. An exploratory study involving 37 African-American infants found that they had between 2 and 5 primary adult caregivers, as well as a larger…

Agrees with Jackson's assertion in the previous article that the development of attachment relationships in an African-American multiple-caregiver context should be analyzed and understood on its own terms to avoid an ethnocentric "Euro-American" perspective. Emphasizes the crucial contribution of overnight care in the development of…

The concept of attachment is reviewed and is found to be somewhat confusing and restrictive. An alternative to this concept, a social network approach, is offered to clarify the issues central to the study of social relationships. (MS)