Mary and Louise were sisters who were tied to a bed with dog leads and had blankets put over them to prevent them from making noise. They were found when Louise was 3.5 years old and Mary was 2.5 years.

Three new studies carried out in the USA and China on how childcare practices affect empathy and moral development suggest that we should use the type of child rearing strategies common in hunter-gatherer societies if we want our children to have good mental health and to be caring and compassionate. These studies will be of interest to anyone studying Relationships (The influence of childhood and adolescent experiences on adult relationships) or Cognition and Development (Development of social cognition).

The latest results from the longitudinal study on the impact of childcare run by the American National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) have shown that high quality childcare before the age of 5 can have a postive effect on academic achievement at age 15.

attachment can be defined as: "...the strong, affectional tie we feel for special people in our lives that leads us to feel pleasure and joy when we interact with them and to be comforted by their nearness in time of stress" (Berk, 1998).  

John Bowlby's explanation of attachment was strongly influenced-by the research and theories of ethologists such as Konrad Lorenz who investigated imprinting in geese. Bowlby reasoned that attachment serves a biological purpose: to keep parents nearby so that infants are protected from danger.

John Bowlby claimed that attachment serves an adaptive purpose: to keep parents and caregivers close to ensure the child's survival. In the early stages of attachment, babies use social releasers, such as crying, grasping, smiling and gazing, to elicit adults' caregiving; Bowlby believed that adults are innately programmed to respond to these signals. Now research using event-related fMRI ,a technique that shows which parts of the brain are activated in response to specific events, has shown that the reward centres of mothers' brains are activated by their own child's smile, but not by the smiles of other children. The report by Baylor College of Medicine researchers appears in the journal Pediatrics today.