Infant and Child Development Inf. Child Dev. 12: 177–195 (2003) Published online in Wiley InterScience 26 March 2003 (www.interscience.wiley.com) DOI: 10.1002/icd.283 Who’s Controlling Whom? Infant Contributions to Maternal Play Behaviour Wallace E. Dixon Jr. a * and P. Hull Smith b a Department of Psychology, East Tennessee State University, Johnson City, TN 37614, USA b Department of Psychology, University of Toledo, OH 43606, USA Because the way mothers play with their children may have significant impacts on children’s social, cognitive, and linguistic development, researchers have become interested in potential predictors of maternal play. In the present study, 40 mother– infant dyads were followed from child age 5–20 months. Five- month habituation rate and 13 and 20 month temperamental difficulty were found to be predictive of maternal play quality at 20 months. The most parsimonious theoretical model was one in which habituation was mediated by temperamental difficulty in predicting mother play. Consistent with prior speculation in the literature, these data support the possibility that mothers adjust some aspects of their play behaviors to fit their children’s cognitive and temperamental capabilities. Copyright # 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Key words: play; temperament; habituation; mother–infant interac- tion; covariance structure modeling                               For nearly two decades, researchers have investigated the relationship of play to the cognitive life of the child. For instance, children’s play is often linked to their linguistic competence (Bates et al., 1979; Bornstein et al., 1992; Shore, 1986; Shore et al., 1984; Tamis-LeMonda and Bornstein, 1989b) as well as their speed of information processing ( Johnson and Brody, 1977; Tamis-LeMonda and Bornstein, 1989a). A considerable literature also reveals that the quality and quantity of children’s play depends in large part on the presence and characteristics of a play partner. Children play at higher levels and for longer periods of time when interacting with their mothers (Fiese, 1990; O’Connell and Bretherton, 1984; Slade, 1987b). Children’s play is affected by the security of their attachment to their mothers (Slade, 1987a). And mothers’ contingent respon- siveness to children’s behaviour in both play (Damast et al., 1996) and non-play Copyright # 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. *Correspondence to: Wallace E. Dixon, Jr. Department of Psychology, East Tennessee State University, Johnson City, TN 37614, USA. E-mail: dixonw@mail.etsu.edu Contract/grant sponsor: Heidelberg College Aigler Faculty.