Almost every day we encounter young children in public places with their parents. While it is not possible to sit back and observe the relationship between parent and child, some may wonder how the parent interacts with the child when they are at home or in a different public setting. Depending on the level of treatment we observe in the couple's presence, a particular type of treatment can be assumed to occur in the private sector of that child's life based solely on how the child is treated in the public sector. Bearing in mind that most parents do not want to expose their home or their children, it is difficult to determine the degree of interaction that actually occurs in private settings. Public sector assessment The most common environment in which parents with children find themselves is often the local supermarket. From this perspective, Atkin (1978) chose to observe families with children in the natural environment of a supermarket, leaving out any intervention by the research group. It looked specifically at how parent-child pairs interacted when choosing a breakfast cereal to purchase. Knowing that self-reports would be an imprecise measure, he chose a “direct observation” method to observe the participants in his study. Observations were conducted at 20 supermarkets in urban and suburban areas of Detroit and Lansing, Michigan. All families with a child aged between 3 and 12 who were considering which cereals to buy were defined as subjects. The observer's responsibility was to record on a form a description of the parent-child exchanges. They also indicated whether any type of conflict had occurred between parent and child and whether both parent and child appeared satisfied with the outcome of the situation. It was discovered… halfway through the article and collaborative parent-child interactions in promoting literacy and numeracy development in Canadian homes. Early Childhood Education Journal. Mitchell, G. G., Obradovich, S., Herring, F., Tromborg, C., & Burns, A. L. (1992). Reproduction of gender in public places: Adult attention to young children in three public places. Sex Roles, 26(7/8), 323-330. Pederson, D., & Moran, G. (2005). Gender and patterns of emotional availability in mother-child and father-child dyads. Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development, 60(2/3), 111-132. Rossi, A., & Rossi, P. (1990). Of human bonding: parent-child relationships across the lifespan. (pp. 10-148). New York, NY: Walter de Gruyter, Inc. Taaffe Young K, Davis K, Schoen C, Parker S. Listening to Parents: A National Survey of Parents with Young Children. Arch Pediatr Adolesc Med. 1998;152(3):255-262.