At 2 Mariela can put all her red blocks in one group and all the blue ones in another. By the time she's 5 she can sort and re_sort a collection of objects that have several different sizes, different shapes, different colors. And when Mariela is 7 or so she can use this strategy of categorization in learning new information; for example, if her teacher gives her a list of words including shirt, eyes, carrot, apple, nose, shoes, pants, cereal, and mouth she can learn the words more efficiently by classifying them into groups: clothing, parts of the body, and foods.

Justin, who is a year and a half, plays with his toys next to another child but doesn't talk to the other child or interact with him except, perhaps, to grab one of his companion's toys or scream if the other child has taken one of his. When Justin is 6 or 7 he can and does engage in group play. He also understands that people have different points of view, although he believes that people act from their own self-interest. By the time he is in his midteens, Justin understands the need for pos­itive human relationships, the desirability of being "good" rather than "bad," and the concept of societal law and order.

What accounts for this gradual but steady evolution in the child's ability to per­ceive and describe complex relationships among things, to learn new things effi­ciently, and to relate to, interact with, and feel responsibility toward other people? The field of child development, or child psychology, seeks to answer this complex question in two major ways: first, by identifying and describing changes in the child's cognitive, emotional, motor, and social capacities and behaviors from the moment of conception through the period of adolescence; second, by uncovering the processes that underlie these changes and help to explain how and why they occur. Moreover, child develop mentalists are interested in the specific strategies that children use to help them achieve new skills and behaviors; for example, the cognitive strategy of categorization and the social strategy of cooperating with oth­ers offer children powerful aids in learning new information and in becoming suc­cessful participants in their social worlds.

Like the broader field of developmental psychology, which concerns itself with changes in human abilities and behavior across the entire life span, child develop­ment takes both an empirical and an applied approach to the study of growth and change. For some scientists, unraveling the mysteries of childhood is a goal in itself. We study children to increase our knowledge about how development evolves and about what processes further or impede this evolution. We can also derive infor­mation about adults from studies of children's development: understanding earlier forms of behavior may help us understand later forms. Moreover, we can observe some processes in simpler forms in children than in adults.

Researchers who study children also undertake their work with many practical and policy implications in mind (Table 1-1 lists some of the issues that this book explores). Better information about child development can assist all members of society who care about the well-being of children, including parents, teachers, health professionals, and legislators. Research findings can lead to helpful advice on a wide range of current issues, from creating and selecting effective day-care pro­grams and handling children's temper tantrums to dealing with the impact of bus­ing and the effects on children of television violence. Finally, information on normal child development helps all those who work with and care for children to detect problems of both physical and mental development, thus facilitating both the prevention and the treatment of developmental difficulties.

Throughout our exploration of contemporary child psychology we will con­tinue to keep these two levels of scientific inquiry in mind. Thus we will repeatedly ask how specific processes and strategies account for different aspects of the child's development. In addition, we will seek to discover how we can use what we learn about these dynamics to improve children's functioning and self-confidence in all the important areas of their lives-their relations with family, friends, and peers; their academic pursuits; and their initial forays into the adult world of work, love, friendship, and societal responsibility.

 

Themes and Theories of Child Development

 

 

. A mother's single use of cocaine can adversely affect her

developing fetus.

. Waterbeds can help premature babies develop.

. Newborns can recognize their own mothers by smell.

. Babies can learn in the womb.

. Even 2-year-olds can be jealous.

. Children learn a new language more easily than their parents. . Divorce affects boys' development more adversely than that of

    girls.

. Aggressive behavior in an 8-year-old can sometimes predict

    criminal behavior at the age of 30.

 

 

A HISTORICAL INTERLUDE

 

The scientific study of child psychology is a relatively young enterprise that got its start just a century ago with the pioneering work of Charles Darwin. In his research on infants' early sensory and perceptual capacities and children's emo­tions, Darwin (1872) clearly demonstrated that scientists could study infants and children. Later, John Watson continued the formal analysis of children's learning capacities. Freud and Piaget, about whom you will read shortly in this chapter, were two other important early contributors to our understanding of children.

Why is this field so young? Part of the reason is that our appreciation of child­hood as a unique period is a relatively modern phenomenon. As the French histo­rian Philipe Aries, in his classic work Centuries of Childhood, documents, for many years people viewed children as miniature adults. Another reason is that people did not value children as we do today. This was, in part, because children often died very young. Many infants died at birth or in the first few months of life, owing largely to people's lack of understanding of germs and infection and to the limited medical knowledge of the times. Another indication of the undervaluation of children was the way adults treated them. Children were often laborers in facto­ries and mines, and it was only in the nineteenth century that child labor laws were introduced to protect children from this kind of exploitation. Even today, child labor laws are not universal, and young children continue to be drafted into the workforce in many countries.

Since the early 1900s the field of child psychology has been concerned not only about improving scientific knowledge about children but about using this knowl­edge to shape social policy on behalf of children (Sears, 1975, Sigel, 1998). Throughout this book we will see many examples of this historically based com­mitment to both science and public policy.

 

THEMES OF DEVELOPMENT

 

As scientists have studied children's development they have continued to confront and debate a number of significant themes. These themes generally pose basically conflicting views: For example, are children's behavior and development the result of biological, or hereditary, influences, or are they formed by environmental forces? Today scientists agree that both our biology and the social and physical

 

 

I

 

 

Maturation- A genetically determined process of growth that unfolds naturally over a period of time.

 

 

environment that surrounds us affect our development, although they may influ­ence different aspects of development in different degrees. Do children play an active role in their own development or only a passive role? Although among mod­ern psychologists the view of the active child is dominant, some investigators still support the passive view. Does development take place in similar ways in children of all cultures and races, or is the experience of each culture distinct and separate? Here again, each view probably owns a little of the truth.

We will encounter these and other themes repeatedly as we discuss the many sides of development-biological, cognitive, linguistic, emotional, and social. We will also see that different theories of child development-discussed in the next major section-emphasize one or more themes in differing degrees (see Table 1-2). Thus it's important to understand the issues reflected in these themes. The more we try to solve the puzzle of children's development the more we learn about the nature and evolution of all human behavior.

 

Biological versus Environmental Influences

Most modern viewpoints recognize that both biological and environmental factors influence human development, but they disagree about the relative importance of each of these factors for different aspects of development. Biological extremists of the past argued that biology is destiny, and that development is merely a matter of maturation. They believed that the course of development was largely predeter­mined by genetic factors; these genetic or biological processes led to the naturally unfolding course of growth called maturation. One early advocate of this view was Arnold Gesell, who suggested, "All things considered, the inevitableness and surety of maturation are the most impressive characteristics of early development. It is the hereditary ballast which conserves and stabilizes the growth of each indi­vidual infant" (Gesell, 1928, p. 378). Opposing this view, other early theorists, such as the behaviorist John B. Watson, placed their emphasis strictly on the environ­ment. Watson (1928) assumed that genetic factors place no restrictions on the ways that environmental events can shape the course of a child's development and claimed that by properly organizing the environment he could produce a Mozart, a Babe Ruth, or an Al Capone.

Today no one supports either of these extreme positions. The challenge to mod­ern develop mentalists is to explore how biological and environmental factors inter­act to produce developmental variations in different children. The interplay between biology and environment is evident in many ways. For example, both cer­tain hormones and exposure to experiences of aggression influence an individual's development of aggressive behavior, both genetic inheritance and nutrition affect physical and social development, and both an infant's temperament and its early environment influence the child's social and personality development.

Thus the question is not which factor is more important, but how the expression of the biological program that we inherit is shaped, modified, and directed by our particular set of environmental circumstances. Anticipating our discussion of lan­guage development (Chapter 8), consider the fact that although infants around the world are biologically equipped to learn to recognize and produce language, before the end of their first year they begin to "tune out" linguistic sounds to which they have not been exposed. For example, Dutch babies can discriminate sounds in both Dutch and English but gradually become unresponsive to English words (Kuhl et aI., 1997). The environment clearly shapes the form that the infant's biologically based language capacity can assume.

 

The Active versus the Passive Child

 

Although early develop mentalists viewed the child as a passive organism who is shaped mainly by external forces in the environment, the prevailing view today is that the child is an active seeker of information and of ways to use it. Those mod­ern theorists who do still hold to the passive view assert, for example, that children

 

are either assertive or shy largely as a result of parental childrearing practices. According to this view, a talented teacher encourages a child to become interested in history or geometry, or association with an antisocial peer group causes a child to become delinquent. In general, however, modern developmentalists disagree sharply with this view, holding instead that children are usually active agents who shape, control, and direct the course of their own development (Bell, 1968; Bugental & Goodnow, 1998). Children, they assert, are curious information seek­ers who intentionally try to understand and explore the - world about them. Moreover, socializing agents like parents, peers, or teachers do not simply mold the child; instead, influence is a two-way process. Children actively modify the actions of their parents and other people whom they encounter in their daily lives.

Continuity versus Discontinuity

One of the major questions that confronts developmental psychologists is how to characterize the nature of developmental change. Some view development as a con­tinuous process whereby, in an orderly way, each new event or change builds on earlier experiences. They see development as smooth and gradual, without any abrupt shifts along the path (Figure 1-la). Others, however, view development as occurring in a series of discrete steps or stages and see the organization of behav­ior as qualitatively different at each new stage or plateau. The concerns of each phase of development and the skills learned in that phase are different from those of every other phase. Consider, for example, the period of adolescence: In the dis­continuous view, we should treat adolescence as a distinctive phase of development that marks an abrupt change in biological, social, and cognitive functioning. A little later in this chapter we consider the theories of Jean Piaget and Sigmund Freud, both of whom proposed stage theories of development (Figure 1-lb displays the Piagetian model). Each theorist proposed that at every stage, new strategies for understanding and acquiring knowledge and for managing interpersonal relation­ships come into play and displace the prior ways of dealing with the world. In con­trast, scientists like Albert Bandura who endorse the continuous view think of the changes in adolescence as part of an ongoing series of smaller shifts that have been going on throughout childhood.

Recently, some theorists (e.g., Siegler, 1998) have suggested that our judgment of continuity or discontinuity depends on the power of the lens we use in examining changes across development. If we look from a distance or over a fairly long period of time, it is clear that there are marked differences between, say, the young infant's tentative motor abilities and the toddler's motor gymnastics or between the fourth grader's and the adolescent's competence at solving problems of logic. Clearly, both level and quality of skill vary greatly in such comparisons. And as we'll see in Chapter 10, younger and older children approach a memory task differently. Young children try to memorize a list of words by rehearsing the list as it's given to them; older children, on the other hand, tend to group the list into categories, just as the 7-year-old in our opening paragraph does. Categorizing words in order to remember them more efficiently is an illustration of a qualitative change in mem­ory. Thus, there are indeed qualitative changes across development.

If we look more closely, however, we find that a change such as a shift to a more efficient memory strategy is not abrupt. In fact, when we examine the ways children solve problems, we find a great deal of variability in the strategies they use at the same point in time: For example, a child may sometimes use a developmentally advanced strategy and at other times a relatively primitive one. Through micro­scopic examination of this sort, we see a very different picture of development-one of gradual change in which the child only slowly learns to adopt the best and devel­opmentally most advanced approach (Figure 1-lc). So over time, qualitative changes proceed in a less coherent and linear way than stage notions of development suggest.

Most contemporary child psychologists hold a more or less middle-of-the­ road view of the continuity-discontinuity issue, seeing development as basically continuous but interspersed with periods of transition in which change may be quite sudden or pronounced. These transitional periods are important because develop­mental processes are often revealed most clearly during such times of change. And transitions come in a variety of forms: Some are biological, such as walking, which may result in a reorganization of the household so that the child cannot reach break­able or dangerous items. Others may be both biological and psychological; the onset of puberty, for example, is often accompanied by changes in how adolescents think about their world and their relationships with family and peers (Caspi, 1998). Still other changes are culturally determined, like the timing of entry into junior high school when the child first confronts new academic subjects and the necessity to move among multiple classrooms and teachers. Moving to a new neighborhood may constitute a major transition if, it involves leaving old friends and making new ones. And the transitions posed by divorce or remarriage often present both children and adults with the need for major adjustments. Each transition the individual experi­ences offers both challenges and opportunities, and the success with which the per­son handles these challenges gives us insight into the nature of his or her development.

 

 

 

. FIGURE 1-1

Continuity and discontinuity in the child's development.

The continuous view (a) sees development as a gradual series of shifts in capacities, skills, and behavior without any abrupt changes. Those who hold the opposite perspective (b), in which development is discontinuous, propose just such abrupt, steplike changes, each qualitatively different from the one that precedes it. Most contemporary developmentalists believe a third view, which holds that development is fundamentally continuous but interspersed with transitions that may appear sudden, most accurately represents the progress of development over time. Siegler's "overlapping waves" model (c) suggests that children use a variety of strategies in thinking and learning and that cognition involves constant competition among different strategies rather than the use of a single strategy at a given age. Although each strategy may take a qualitative step forward in effectiveness, at any given point in time the child uses several strategies of varying levels of sophistication. The use of each strategy ebbs and flows with increasing age and expertise, and it is only gradually that the most successful strategies predominate. As a result, from a macroscopic perspective, development appears generally continuous, but at a microscopic level we can observe specific qualitative changes. (Source: part (c) from Children's Thinking, 3rd ed. by Siegler, R., p. 92. Copyright (Q 1998 Prentice-Hall, Inc., Upper Saddle River, NJ. Reprinted with permission.)

 

\_

 

 

 

 

Situational Influences versus Individual Characteristics

 

Children grow up in a variety of diverse settings such as homes, schools, play­grounds, and streets. How much do the contexts in which we study children affect what we learn about them? Do children behave differently in certain settings than in others, or do their individual predispositions and personality characteristics cause them to behave similarly across a broad range of situations? Can we describe certain children as honest, dependent, aggressive, or helpful and expect them to exhibit these qualities at all times? How will these traits be manifested in different situations-a difficult test, a confrontation with an angry parent or teacher, a com­petitive game, or a friend in need? Developmental psychologists differ in terms of the importance they assign to personality or person factors in contrast to situa­tional or setting variables. Many resolve the controversy by adopting an interacationist viewpoint, which stresses the dual role of personality and situational factors (Magnusson, 1996; Magnusson & Stattin, 1998). For example, children who have aggressive personality traits may often seek out contexts in which they can display these characteristics; thus they're more likely to join a gang or enroll in a karate class than opt for the church choir or a stamp collector's club (Bullock & Merrill, 1980). But these same children, in settings that don't allow or promote aggressive behavior, may be friendly, reasonable, and cooperative.

 

Cultural Universals versus Cultural Relativism

 

Children who grow up on a farm in China or a kibbutz in Israel, in a village in Peru, or in a suburb in the United States have very different kinds of experiences. Developmental psychologists differ in how they view the importance of culture. Some argue that culture-free laws of development will be discovered to apply to all children in all cultures. Others argue that the cultural setting in which children grow up plays a major role in formulating the laws that govern development. Between these extreme views is one suggesting that development proceeds every­where in the same orderly fashion but that the rates at which children in different societies progress may vary. For example, in some cultures, children are encour­aged to walk very early and are given opportunities to exercise their new skills. In other cultures, infants are carried or swaddled for long periods of time, which reduces their chances to walk until they are older.

Cultures differ not only across national boundaries but within single countries. The United States, Australia, and Russia, for example, all contain a wide range of subcultural groups representing very diverse racial and ethnic traditions (Fisher, Jackson, & Villaruel, 1998). In the United States it is not uncommon to find Native American, African American, Japanese American, Hispanic American, European American, and other racial-ethnic children together in a single school or classroom. In spite of the controversy about how culture influences development, today most child develop mentalists recognize the importance of considering cultural contexts in their accounts of development (Rogoff, 1998). Later in this chapter we will encounter a theorist, Lev Vygotsky, who put special emphasis on the important role that culture plays in development.

Cultures are, of course, constantly undergoing change. U.S. society, for example, has seen dramatic changes since the 1950s: To mention just a few of these changes, divorce and remarriage are more common, delayed childbearing is on the rise, the majority of women work outside the home, and personal computers are becoming almost as common in households as the television set. Are the laws that govern children's behavior affected by these changes, or do children develop in much the same way regardless of shifts in the culture that surrounds them? Theories 'differ considerably in the seriousness with which they regard these kinds of shifts, but all recognize that such changes may playa part in influencing a child's development.

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the world's many varied cultures children begin, often at an early age, to develop specialized skills. In Somalia a son learns the care and management of camels from his father. In Kotzebue, Alaska, an Inupiat mother guides her daughter in mending fishnets.

 

_

 

Risk and Resilience

 

Our final theme of child development is the role played by the combination of risk and resilience in childrens development. As we grow and mature, we encounter a variety of risks that may alter our developmental trajectories for better or for worse. Such risks or challenges may alter a child's course of development from nor­mal to nonnormal or from a nonnormal course to a normal one. And risk comes in many forms. Some risks are genetic or biological: for example, a serious illness, or having to live with a psychotic parent. Other risks are demographic: family income, education, or membership in a minority group. Other risks include divorce, the death or remarriage of a parent, physical accidents, multiple shifts in home or care­givers, and institutionalization or repeated hospitalization.

Individual children respond to such risks in very different ways. Many seem to suffer permanent developmental disruptions or delays. Others show "sleeper" effects; they seem to cope well initially, but exhibit problems later in development. Still others, however, exhibit resilience under the most difficult of circumstances, and some not only are able to cope with risk but seem actually to be enhanced by it. Moreover, when they confront new risks later in life these children seem better able to adapt to challenges than children who have experienced little or no risk; in a kind of inoculation effect, they appear to have learned from their experiences (Hetherington, 1991b; Rutter, 1987; Rutter & Rutter, 1993).

Researchers who have studied resilient individuals have identified three primary types of protective factors, or personal attributes and environmental conditions, that appear to buffer the child-and later, the adult-from the effects of risk and stress and to promote coping and good adjustment in the face of adversity. The first set of factors consists of positive individual attributes. Children who have easy temperaments and high self-esteem and who are intelligent and independent are more adaptable in the face of stressful life experiences (Hetherington, 1991 b; Rutter, 1987; Werner, 1988). Girls and women seem to have a slight edge on resiliency in comparison with boys and men. The second set of protective factors are combined in a supportive family environment. For example, the presence of one warm supportive parent can help to buffer the adverse effects of poverty, divorce, family discord, and child abuse (Luthar & Zigler, 1991). The final set of factors comprises people outside the family as well as societal agencies and institu­tions: for example, the school system, peer groups, and churches that support both children's and parents' coping efforts. The effects of these protective factors are not automatic; that is, it is only the individuals who actually make use of such poten­tially supportive resources who benefit from them.

Studies of risk and resilience show clearly that, contrary to what traditional the­ories often proposed, development does not proceed along a single, common path­way. Contemporary viewpoints stress that, as they develop, individual children often follow very diverse pathways. Differences in the types and the timing of experiences have profound influences on a child's course of development. A child who experiences serious health problems, fails a grade, reaches puberty early, and drops out of high school will have a radically different developmental pathway from the one traversed by the child who encounters, say, parental divorce and fre­quent changes in residence but no academic failure. At the same time, we know that children whose pathways are difficult may still mature into well-adjusted adults. Throughout our exploration of children's development we will continually encounter both risk and protective factors, and by tracing how, at different points in development, individual children respond to these challenges we can increase our understanding of the process of development.

 

THEORETICAL PERSPECTIVES ON DEVELOPMENT

 

Theories about the way children grow and mature playa central part in the scien­tific process of understanding children's development. Theories serve two main functions. First, they help organize and integrate existing information into coher­ent and interesting accounts of how children develop. Second, they lead to testable hypotheses or predictions about children's behavior. No theory is able to account for all aspects of human development, and, as you will see, many of the theories we discuss try to explain and predict a limited area of behavior. For example, the behavioral and cognitive social learning theories we discuss first have focused par­ticularly on learning and on social and emotional behavior; the perspectives of Piaget, Vygotsky, and those who study information processing tend to emphasize cognition, language, and social interaction; the theories advanced by Freud and Erikson place much more emphasis on emotional development and psychopathol­ogy. Systems theory perspectives tend to be rather eclectic, as is the life span per­spective, which carries the concept of development beyond adolescence into adulthood. Ethological theory, too, endeavors to encompass all areas of behavior, especially biological and social aspects of development.

As we will see, different theories vary both in the emphasis they give to the devel­opmental themes we have just discussed and in the positions they take on the questions these themes pose. It may be helpful to you, as you read this section on theoretical views of development, to refer occasionally to Table 1-2 (see pages 6-7), which locates major discussions of the theories throughout the book and provides an overview of the way the themes and the theories are related. Although we have given some theories more space than others, you should not take this as a sign of their rel­ative importance but a reflection of our decision to give certain theories more in­depth treatment in later chapters. Our goal here is simply to give you the flavor and diversity of different theoretical approaches to development. In the last section of this chapter we will revisit the table as we summarize our discussions of how the var­ious theoretical perspectives view and interpret the themes of development.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Learning Perspectives

The study of learning is one of the oldest subdisciplines of human psychology. In this section we explore some of the principal learning theories that have been applied to developmental issues. We begin with the work of the behaviorists and then consider the approach of the cognitive social learning theorists.

Behavioral Theories

The behaviorist approach to development is exemplified in the work of John B. Watson, Ivan Pavlov, and B. F. Skinner, who developed central ideas of learning and applied these ideas to children's development. Behaviorism, which holds that the­ories of behavior must be based on observations of actual behavior rather than on speculation about motives or other unobservable factors, views development as a continuous process, not a discontinuous or stagelike process. On this view, the same principles of learning shape development throughout childhood and, indeed, across the entire life span. Children playa relatively passive role in their own devel­opment; like computers, which can do only what programmers tell them to do, children do only what the environment directs that they do. Modern developmen­talists do not generally accept these radical assumptions, but in the history of child psychology the behaviorist view did playa prominent role. A good example of the behaviorist approach is Pavlov's famous experiment in which he showed that a dog would learn to salivate at the sound of a bell if that sound were always associated with the presentation of food. The dog typically salivated at the appearance of food; if the food was repeatedly paired with the sound of a bell, eventually the dog learned to salivate at the sound of the bell whether or not it was accompanied by food. This type of learning is called classical conditioning. Watson, following Pavlov's demonstration, used classical conditioning to explain many aspects of children's behavior, especially emotions such as fear. For example, he conditioned an II-month-old infant to fear furry animals by showing the baby, who was easily frightened by noises, a white rat and simultaneously making a loud noise.

Another form of conditioning, studied by B. F. Skinner, focuses on the impact of the consequences of a person's behavior, rather than on the results of simply pair­ing particular stimuli. According to Skinner's theory of operant conditioning, behavior is modified by the types of rewarding or punishing events that follow it. If we apply this theory to children's behavior, positive reinforcement of a particu­lar behavior in the form of a friendly smile, specific praise, or a special treat can increase the likelihood that a child will exhibit that behavior again. On the other hand, punishment in the form of a frown, criticism, or the withdrawal of such priv­ileges as watching television can decrease the chance that a child will engage in that same behavior again.

Using operant reinforcement principles, Skinner explained a wide range of behaviors, and many later researchers have shown the value of his approach for understanding both how children's behaviors develop and how we can change such behaviors. Gerald Patterson (Patterson, 1982, 1993; Patterson & Capaldi, 1991), for example, has shown how children's aggressive behavior is often increased rather than decreased by the very attention that parents pay to such acts as hitting and teasing. Patterson has also shown that punishment of these kinds of acts by "time­out" -a brief period of isolation away from other family members-can help diminish aggressive behavior. Operant conditioning has been incorporated into many applied programs to help teachers and parents change children's behavior, including hyperactivity (restlessness, inattention, impulsivity) and aggression.

 

 

 

Cognitive Social Learning Theory

According to cognitive social learning theory, children learn not only through classical and operant conditioning but also by observing and imitating others (Bandura, 1989). In a series of classic studies, Bandura showed that if children were exposed to the aggressive behavior of another person they were likely to imitate that behavior. A group of nursery school children watched an adult punch, kick, and pummel a large Bobo doll (a downlike, inflated rubber doll that pops back up after each attack) either live or on videotape. When the children were later given the chance to play with this doll, they were more likely to attack and play aggressively with it than were a group of children who had not seen the model. Moreover, the child observers reproduced many of the adult model's behaviors quite accurately and precisely. Neither the adult model nor the children had received any apparent reinforcement, yet quite clearly the children had learned some specific behaviors.

Since Bandura's original studies, many researchers who have explored children's learning by observation and imitation have concluded that such learning has both positive and negative aspects. Box 1-1, which describes the impact on children's intellectual development of watching the television program "Sesame Street," gives us one example of the beneficial effects such learning can have. On the negative side, as we discuss in Chapters 2 and 14, there is evidence that children who watch a great deal of television violence are more likely to develop aggressive attitudes and behaviors (Comstock, 1991; Huston & Wright, 1998).

The clues that social learning theory provided as to how the process of imitation works led to experimentation that revealed the important contribution of cognition to the process of observational learning. Discovering that children do not imitate blindly, or automatically, but rather select specific behaviors to imitate, contempo­rary social learning theorists became increasingly interested in the role of cognitive factors in observation and imitation. As Figure 1-2 illustrates, Bandura has sug­gested four sets of processes that govern how well a child will learn by observing another person. First, many factors determine whether a child will attend to a model's behavior. Children interpret and process the social behaviors they observe on the basis of their own personality variables, their past experience, their relation­ship with the model or models they observe, and the situations in which observa­tion takes place. Second, specific cognitive skills involved in retention play an important role in observational learning. In order to imitate, children must be capa­ble of remembering the many nuances of the behavior a model is displaying, and children who use active strategies (see the chapter's opening paragraph) in rehears­ing, organizing, and recalling the observed behaviors are the most effective learn­ers. Third, the observer must have the capacity to reproduce the observed behaviors. Fourth and last, the child must be motivated or have an incentive to reproduce a model's actions. Together these four sets of processes determine how effectively a child will learn by observing the behavior of others.

 

II FIGURE 1-2

Bandura's model of observational learning.

To produce a behavior that matches that of a model, a child goes through four sets of processes. Her ability to attend to the modeled behavior is influenced by factors in her own experience as well as in the situation; her skill in retaining what she has observed reflects a collection of cognitive skills; her reproduction of the behavior depends on other cognitive skills including the use of feedback from others; and she will be motivated to produce the behavior by various incentives, her own standards, and her tendency to compare herself with others.

 

(Source: Based on Bandura, 1989)

cognitive social learning theory A learning theory that stresses learning by observation and imitation mediated by cognitive' processes and skills.

 

 

	Retention Rehearsal Organization Recall Other cognitive skills

 

                         " RETENTION

           Renearsal

       Or_anJR_#i_!l

        ..Recall'

                            ..."f      j)skills

 

 

 

 

Rarely                 2 to                    4 to                   More

                         3 times               5 times           than 5 times

                        per week            per week              per week'

Frequency with which children watched "Sesame Street"

 

Watching “Sesame Street” makes test scores rise. In one of the first studies of the effects on children of watching “Sesame Street” researchers found that on such tests as identification of body parts; recognition of letters, numbers, and geometric forms; and classifying and sorting, preschoolers who watched the show frequently performed significantly better than those who watched little.

 

 

Together, classical, operant, and cognitive social learning approaches have been highly influential in helping researchers understand children's development. Throughout this book, as we examine children's social, emotional, and intellectual development, we will repeatedly encounter evidence of these different types of learning.

 

Cognitive Developmental Perspectives

Contributing to the realization that cognitive factors playa major role in children's learning and development were the so-called organismic theories of development, theories that hold that psychological structures and processes within the child help to determine his or her development. As you may guess, this perspective sees children as the active organizers of their experience. The best­ known organismic theory of development is Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget's cog­nitive structural theory. Piaget's view has had a profound influence on our thinking about human development. In this section we also introduce the work of Lev Vygotsky who, like Piaget, saw the child as playing an active role but put more emphasis on the notion of development as a joint enterprise between the child and his social environment.

 

.

Piagetian Theory

According to Piagetian theory, two complementary cognitive processes play a major role in promoting change and increasing children's cognitive understanding of their world. On one hand, children use their current knowledge of how the world works as a framework for the absorption or assimilation of new expe­riences. On the other hand, children modify their existing knowledge base by incorporating new information into its frameworks, or mental structures. Through the process of accommodation they modify these frameworks in response to the new input from their environment. As they develop, children reach a better and more meaningful understanding of their world through the interplay between these comple­mentary processes.

 

 

 

A child psychologist at the universities of Geneva and

Lausanne, Switzerland, Jean Piaget (1 896-1980) framed a theory of the child's cognitive development that has had great impact on developmentalists, educators, and others concerned with the course and determinants of children's development. The literature on child development today continues to examine Piagetian concepts and techniques as it also refines and expands his work.

 

 

According to this viewpoint, children actively interpret and make sense of the information and events they encounter. They are not passive receivers of experience, shaped by the reinforcements and models to which they are exposed; they actively seek experience in order to build their cognitive worlds. Because of this continual interpretation and reorganization of experience, children construct their own real­ity, a reality that may differ from the objective reality that adults perceive. In addi­tion, the way a child organizes new information depends on her level of cognitive development. Piaget prop6sed that all children go through several stages of cogni­tive development, each characterized by qualitatively different ways of thinking, organizing knowledge, and solving problems. Thus, as you can see in Figure I-lb, the Piagetian stage concept sees development as discontinuous.                                                       .

Young children are more bound than adolescents and adults to sensory and motor information, and they are also less flexible and less able to think symbolically and abstractly. It is not until adolescence that the ability to use logic and to engage in deductive reasoning appears. Young children are also more egocentric-that is, they are more centered on their own perspectives than older children and less able to take the viewpoints or understand the feelings and perceptions of others. According to Piaget, we may think of cognitive development as a decentering process, in which the child shifts from a focus on self, immediate sensory experi­ence, and single-component problems to a more complex, multifaceted, and abstract view of the world.

 

 

Vygotsky's Sociocultural Theory

The developmental theory proposed by Lev Vygotsky is unique in placing par­ticular emphasis on the impact of children's social and cultural worlds on their development. Despite his early death as the age of 38, Vygotsky, who was a con­temporary of Piaget, has had a major impact on our thinking about cognitive development. At the time Vygotsky wrote, the communist revolution had just come into full bloom in the Soviet Union, and much of his theory reflects the phi­losophy of the times. Vygotsky's work was banned in the early 1940s when Stalin came to power, and as a result it is only rather recently that Western psychologists have begun to give his theory the attention it deserves (Belmont, 1989; Wertsch & Tulviste, 1994).

Vygotsky's sociocultural theory of development contrasts markedly with those of Piaget and other Western develop mentalists. Whereas the latter generally focus on development as it is achieved by the individual child, Vygotsky's theory pro­poses that the child's development is best understood as a product of social inter­action, that it evolves as the child and her more-sophisticated partners-parents, teachers, and others-solve such problems as learning to count or to read. Thus Vygotskian theory focuses on dyadic interaction rather than on individual behav­ior. It is through the assistance provided by others in her social environment that the child gradually learns to function intellectually on her own, as an individual. According to Vygotsky, every child has a set of innate abilities, such as perceptual and memory skills. It is input from the child's society, in the form of interactions with adults and peers who are more skilled than the child, that molds these basic abilities into more complex, higher-order cognitive functions.

By emphasizing the socially mediated nature of cognitive processes Vygotsky's approach offers a fresh perspective from which to view cognitive development. In addition, his theory has given direction to new ways of assessing children's cogni­tive potential and new ways of teaching reading, mathematics, and writing (Belmont, 1989; Brown & Campione, 1990; Rogoff, 1998). A vivid example of Vygotskian theory in action in the modern classroom is peer tutoring, in which an older child helps a younger pupil learn to read, write, add, subtract, and so on. Vygotsky has also increased our appreciation of the profound importance of cul­tural variation in development, as Box 1-2 illustrates.      .

 

How Culture Can Affect Children's Cognitive Development

 

Lev Vygotsky's theory placed particular emphasis on the significance of culture in children's development. Vygotsky enunciated two important principles of cultural influence in his theory. First, cultures vary in the institutions and settings they provide to facilitate children's cognitive development. Consider an example from Uzbekistan, a former member of the old Soviet Union: Traditional Uzbekis, for the most part illiterate, responded to reasoning problems using concrete examples based on their own experience. On the theory that education can transform the ways in which we think, AIexander Luria (1971), an early collaborator of Vygotsky, showed that Uzbekis who learned to read and write began to approach problems in different ways. For example, they treated reasoning problems such as syllogisms as logical (and abstract) puzzles (Scribner, 1985).

Other researchers have come up with similar findings in other cultures of the world. For example, Saxe (1982) found that the Oksapmim people of Papua, New Guinea, relied on a rudimentary number system based on their own body parts to help them deal with the demands of daily life (rather like the Western child's counting on his fin­gers). However, as a result not only of education but of new occupational and trading activities, the system is changing: Not only paper and pencil notations but calcu­lators are transforming the Oksapmim's traditional count­ing methods.

Consider another example in which a visitor to a culture was frustrated, in attempting to learn a skill, by culturally determined teaching methods: A U.S. college student undertook to study loom weaving with an experienced weaver of the Zinacantan culture, in Mexico. For two months the student observed while the weaver created her fabric; the weaver would often call the student's attention to a fine point of her technique, but she never allowed the student to lay a hand on the loom. Instead, she would say from time to time that inasmuch as the student had seen her do the weaving, she had learned it herself. Although the student kept silent, she did not agree; indeed, she wanted to shout, "Let me try it myself!" Understandably, perhaps, she was more than chagrined when, at last given the loom, her inevitable mistakes elicited the weaver's crit­icism that she hadn't watched and therefore hadn't learned (Greenfield & Childs, 1991).

In the Zinacanteco culture, motoric quietude and a habit of responding rather than initiating have been val­ued qualities. Perhaps a Zinacanteco student of weaving would have sat more quietly and attended more closely to the actions of the weaving master than did the U.S. stu­dent. On the other hand, the authors point out, at the time they began their study of development and cultural context weavers produced a limited number of patterns, but within a few years new patterns were becoming com­mon; one wonders if the teaching method has changed as well.

 

Like Piaget, Vygotsky was a stage theorist, defining development in terms of abrupt shifts rather than steady, incremental change, and he believed in studying the processes by which development occurs, not just its end products. He was also interested in what he considered the psychological tools children use to understand their world. These tools, or mediators-which can take a variety of forms-include language, counting, mnemonic devices, algebraic symbols, art, and writing. As chil­dren develop, different tools emerge to permit them to function more effectively in solving problems and understanding their cognitive world.

 

information-processing theories -Theories of development that focus on the flow of information through the child's cognitive system and that are particularly interested in the specific operations the child performs between input and output phases.

Information-Processing Approaches

Unlike Piaget's and Vygotsky's stage theories of development, information ­processing theories emphasize the continuous flow of development: "The quality of children's thinking at any stage depends on what information they represent in a particular situation, how they operate on the information to achieve their goal, and how much information they can keep in mind at one time" (Siegler, 1991, p. 59).

Theorists in this tradition often use computer analogies and flowcharts to describe the precise steps that a child must take to solve a problem and generate an answer (see Figure 10-1 in Chapter 10). These models are not meant to imply that human beings think in the same way that computers process information; the strategies are designed simply to help researchers plot expected steps in a precise

manner. Information-processing theorists focus on the flow of information through the cognitive system, beginning with an input or stimulus and ending with an output or response (Klahr, 1989; Klahr & Mac Whinney, 1998). Output may take a variety of forms including an action, a decision, an insight, a verbalization, or simply a memory that is stored for later use.

So far, this sounds similar to the behavioral approach, but information-process­ing theorists are most interested in the steps or operations that a child performs between input and output. What operations does the child perform to achieve the output? He attends to information, changes it into a mental or cognitive represen­tation, stores it in memory, compares it to other memories, generates various responses, makes a decision about the most appropriate response, and, finally, takes some specific action. These operations are analogous to the way computers deal with information; information in the form of symbols is entered into the system and this input undergoes a series of transformations-it is registered, organized, and stored, and finally it provides an answer or output. We can also draw analogies between the human brain and computer hardware, and between the human being's cognitive operations like attention, evaluation, decision making, and memory stor­age and retrieval and the software that enables the computer to function.

Consider this illustration of the information-processing approach in which we trace the steps that a child goes through in trying to understand a new story, Dr. Dolittle's tale of the pushmi-pullyu, a horselike creature that has a head at each end.

The delighted child attends to the picture of the creature while ignoring other objects on the page and encodes it visually, as an image, or verbally, as a "pushmi-pullyu" or a "two­headed horse." He processes this visual or verbal representation further as he compares it with previously stored information about horses or fantastic creatures such as uni­corns. Furthermore, the child may [pose questions based on the] implications [of] having two heads ("How does it know if it's coming or going?"), store the new information in a way that allows him to recognize pushmi-pullyus on future occasions, and finally laugh, ask his father to reread the page, or look ahead in the book for more pictures of the pushmi-pullyu (Miller, 1993, p. 235).

 

 

As this example illustrates, according to the information-processing perspective, the child, in order to understand or achieve meaning about some external event, engages in a series of cognitive operations by which information is changed, trans­formed, and manipulated over time. The hallmark of this perspective is the precise way in which it specifies the steps that the child takes to achieve this understanding.

The information-processing approach has been applied particularly to a wide range of problems of cognitive development, including attention, memory, prob­lem solving, and planning. In Chapter 10 we give particular attention to this devel­opmental approach. Information-processing theory is also proving to be a highly valuable approach to the study of how children develop an understanding of read­ing, mathematics, and science (Siegler,1991; 1998). And, interestingly, this approach has also provided a powerful analytic tool for understanding social behavior, such as social problem solving and aggression (Crick & Dodge, 1994).

 

Psychodynamic Perspectives

With his introduction of psychoanalytic theory, Sigmund Freud initiated a revolu­tion in thinking about human motivation and personality. Freud's general views on the critical role played in the development of personality by events occurring in the early years of development-especially those having to do with basic drives such as hunger and sexual urges-and by instinctual and unconscious motivation were seen as radical in the early 1900s. Today, however, Freudian views are accepted at least in part by many Western psychologists. An innovative theorist who con­stantly revised his theory, Freud has had an enormous influence on psychological and psychiatric thinking. Many of his specific concepts, however, continue to invite debate and controversy. Today those who follow in his footsteps generally hold to what is called psychodynamic theory, which, in its simplest form, proposes that dynamic forces within the individual determine motivation and behavior. Psychodynamic theories have been more influential in clinical, or applied, settings than in scientific research, and for this reason they have been less often incorpo­rated into the study of child development than other theories discussed here.

In this section we examine not only traditional Freudian theory but the devel­opmental theory of Erik Erikson, who accepted many of Freud's basic ideas but expanded them to include the full life span from childhood to adulthood and old age. Erikson also gave more recognition to the importance, in both child and adult development, of social interaction, social influence, and culture.

 

 

 

Freudian Theory

According to Freud's psychoanalytic theory of development, psychological growth and change are governed by unconscious drives and instincts. Freud stressed the role of biologically based drives such as sex, aggression, and hunger in determining behavior. At the same time, he held that these drives were shaped by encounters with the environment, especially other family members. For Freud, the developing personality consists of three interrelated parts: the id, the ego, and the superego. The roles that each of these three components of personality play change across development as the infant, who is largely under the control of the id, or its instinctual drives, gradually becomes more rational and reality bound. The id oper­ates on the pleasure principle, which is oriented toward maximizing pleasure and satisfying needs immediately. As the infant develops, the ego, or the rational, con­trolling part of personality, emerges and attempts to gratify needs through appro­priate, socially constructive behavior. The third component of personality, the superego, emerges when the child internalizes-that is, accepts and absorbs­ parental or societal morals, values, and roles and develops a conscience, or the abil­ity to apply moral values in judging her own acts.

To Freud, development was a discontinuous process. In each of five discrete stages, biological forces orchestrate the relations between the developing child and his world (see also Table 1-3). In the first, oral stage, which extends through the first year of life, the infant is preoccupied with activities such as eating, sucking, and biting and with objects, such as food, that can be put in the mouth. Freud assumed that the infant derived great enjoyment and satisfaction from these oral behaviors. In the second or sometimes third year, priorities change: In this anal stage, the child is forced to learn to postpone the pleasure of expelling feces, as his parents struggle with the task of toilet training. From here until the fifth or sixth year, the phallic stage holds sway: Children's sexual curiosity is aroused. Their pre­occupation with their own sexual anatomy and the pleasures of genital stimulation alerts them as well to the differences in sexual anatomy between the genders.

During the phallic period, boys become enmeshed in the Oedipus complex, in which they are attracted to their mothers and feel themselves jealous rivals of their fathers but also fear the latter will punish them by cutting off their genitals. The Oedipus complex is resolved when boys give up their sexual feelings for their mothers and identify with their fathers. In the Electra complex, girls blame their mothers for their own lack of a penis and focus their sexual feelings on their fathers, who possess the penis Freud believed they wanted. When they finally real­ize that they cannot possess their fathers as mates, girls transfer their feelings to other males. They relinquish their resentment of their mothers and instead begin to identify with her. These dramatic events are followed by the latency period, when Freud believed that sexual drives are temporarily submerged. During this period, which lasts from about 6 years of age to puberty, children avoid relationships with opposite-gender peers and become intensely involved with peers of the same gender. As we will discuss further in Chapter 13, this turning from the family to the peer group is associated with the acquisition of the social skills necessary to func­tion effectively in the world. In Freud's last stage, the genital period, sexual desires reemerge, but this time they are more appropriately directed toward peers. Once again, biological change-in this case, puberty-plays a significant role in defining developmental focus.

According to Freud, the ways in which the child negotiates each of these stages has a profound impact on his later, adult personality. For example, infants who have unsatisfied needs for oral stimulation may be more likely to smoke as adults. Or toddlers whose parents toilet trained them extremely early and in a very rigid manner may later be obsessively concerned with neatness and cleanliness. Research has in fact supported very few of these predictions, but the general view that events in infancy and childhood have a formative impact on later development remains a central issue in the study of child development.

pychoanalytic theory of development: Freud's theory t,at development, which proceeds in discrete stages, is determined largely by biologically based drives shaped by encounters with the environment and. through the interaction of these c6mponents of personality-the id, ego, and superego.

 

Id: The person's instinctual drives; the first component of the personality to evolve, the id operates on the basis of the pleasure principle.

 

Ego: The rational, controlling component of the personality, which tries to satisfy needs through appropriate, socially acceptable behaviors.

 

Superego: The personality component that is the repository of the child's internalization of parental or societal values, morals, and roles.

 

Oedipus complex: A primary dynamic of the phallic stage of Freudian development theory in which the boy is sexually attracted to his mother, is a rival with his father, and fears his father's retribution.

 

Electra complex: A primary dynamic of Freud's phallic stage in which a girl resents her mother for having deprived her of a penis and transfers her affections to her father.

 

Stage of Development

 

Age Period                                    Freudian                                                                                                Eriksonian

 

 

0-1            Oral. Focus on eating and taking things into the mouth        Infancy. Task: To develop basic trust in oneself and  others.        

                                                                                                                Risk: mistrust of others and lack o confidence

                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

 

1-3                Anal. Emphasis on toilet training; first experience                Early Childhood. Task: To learn self-control and establish

With discipline and authority                                                 autonomy. Risk: shame and doubt about one's own capabilities

 

3-6           Phallic. Increase in sexual urges leads to Oedipus                 Play Age. Task: To develop initiative in mastering environment.

complex in males and Electra complex in females                   Risk: Feelings of guilt over aggressiveness and daring

 

6-12             Latency. Sexual urges repressed; emphasis on education      School Age. Task: To develop industry Risk: Feelings of inferiority

and the beginnings of concern for others                                 over real or imagined failure to master tasks

 

12-20       Genital. Altruistic love joins selfish love; need for               Adolescence. Task: To achieve a sense of identity.

reproduction of species underlies adoption of adult              Risk: Role confusion over who and what individual wants to be

responsibilities*

 

20-30                                                                                                       Young Adulthood. Task: To achieve intimacy with others.                                                                                                                                     Risk: Shaky identity may lead to avoidance of others and isolation

 

30-65                                                                                                                                                          Adulthood. Task: To express oneself through 'generativity.

Risk: Inability to create children, ideas, or products may lead to stagnation

 

65+                                                                                                                                                                Mature Age. Task: To achieve a sense of integrity.

                                                                                                                Risk: Doubts and unfulfilled desires may lead to

                                                                                                                despair

 

*Freud's genital stage encompassed both adolescence and adulthood.

 

 

Erikson's Theory

Erik Erikson, one of Freud's most influential disciples, is a good example of the many followers who accepted a considerable number of Freud's general concepts but turned gradually to a view that gave greater emphasis to the effects of the social environment on the individual's development. Erikson's psychosocial theory held, as did Freudian theory, that development was discontinuous, proceeding through a series of stages. However, as you can see from Table 1-3, Erikson proposed eight specific devel­opmental stages across the life span, whereas Freud left his last stage open-ended, suggesting that is encompassed both adolescence and adult­hood. For every one of his stages, Erikson spec­ified the personal and social tasks that the individual must accomplish as well as the risks the individual confronts if she fails at the tasks of that particular stage.

In the first stage, of infancy, the challenge of acquiring a sense of basic trust is the main task. By learning to trust his parents or caretakers the infant learns to trust not only his environment but himself. If he finds others not trustworthy, he may develop mistrust of both himself and the world. In early childhood, children must learn self-control and develop autonomy but may develop shame and self-doubt if they remain worried and concerned about their continuing dependency and their inability to live up to adult expectations. During the play age, between about 3 and 6, children struggle to develop initiative and to master their environment but at the same time often feel guilty if they are too aggressive, too daring. Between 6 and 12, during the school age, children try to develop industry, largely by succeeding in school. This is also a period of constant social comparison whereby children evaluate their skills in relation to their peers. Real or imagined failure at either academic or social tasks may bring feelings of inferiority.

In Erikson's stage of adolescence, the child's main focus is the search for a sta­ble definition of the self-that is, for a self-identity-and the danger is role confu­sion, in which the individual cannot get a grip on who or what she wants to be. In young adulthood, the task is to achieve intimacy with others and, in particular, a stable intimate and sexual relationship with one other. Problems in earlier stages, such as a shaky sense of identity, may lead to the avoidance of relations with others and thus to isolation. The task that confronts the individual in adulthood is to cre­ate something-children, ideas, or products. If not given expression, this quality of generativity can deteriorate into stagnation. In Erikson's last stage, that of mature age, ego integrity is the goal. When reflection on one's past accomplishments and failures leads to doubt and regret, despair may be the result.

Psychodynamic theories have helped shape many of the concerns of modern child psychology, including the impact of early experience on later behavior, the role of the family in socialization, and-particularly through Erikson's work-the impact of social interaction on children's development. For some years few researchers actively tested psychodynamic theories, and their concepts and princi­ples were of most interest to professional psychologists and others working with people who were psychologically distressed. Beginning about the 1980s there was a revival of interest in certain issues, such as Erikson's concept of the formation of self-identity in adolescence (Grotevant, 1986; Waterman, 1985). More recently, investigators have examined the concept of generativity, especially the effects of being a parent on this quality in adulthood (Hawkins & Dollahite, 1997; Snarey, 1993).

 

Erik Erikson (1902-1990) left his native Germany after finishing school and wandered through Europe, sketching and writing

about what he saw, in search of his own identity. This journey led him eventually to the practice of psychoanalysis and to one of his best-known concepts, that of the child-adplescent's identity crisis. Erikson's psychosocial theory of development, spanning the entire life course, continues to inform the thinking of many psychologists and other social scientists.

 

Systems Theory Perspectives

For a long time developmentalists and other psychologists have realized that chil­dren as well as adults function not only in many different settings-such as home, school, workplace-but in broader contexts, such as communities and societies. As we have seen, some theorists, notably Vygotsky and Erikson, have taken particular account of the effects of social and cultural surroundings on the developing indi­vidual. Nevertheless, until recently the notion of the responsible individual-the independent self, rational, and self-constructed-that evolved out of Cartesian and other Enlightenment thinking held sway in psychology as' in philosophy and other fields (Fogel, 1993). Beginning in the late nineteenth century, thinkers in such diverse fields as evolutionary science (Charles Darwin), physics (Albert Einstein), and economics (Karl Marx) began to emphasize the importance of the physical and social surround, and out of their thought came the notion that "the idea of human interdependence, of social relativity, of people and their products as individuals who construct the social order, of freedom from hereditary predestination and from the constraints of centralized leadership, cannot be traced to a single individ­ual but to a socio-historical process that shaped the character of Western science and thought" (Fogel, 1993, p. 45). We consider two theoretical perspectives that illustrate a systems theory approach to development: dynamic systems theory and ecological systems theory.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dynamic Systems Theory

Around the turn of the last century, scientists began to think in terms of process­ a concept we have alluded to before-and in terms of the system, which can be defined most simply as a regularly interacting or interdependent group of parts. What makes the system more than just a collection of parts is its dynamism; because its parts are in constant motion, the processes in which they engage and the relationships they form and maintain become the primary focus of the system. Thus in dynamic systems theory, individuals and their achievements remain sig­nificant but must be understood and interpreted within the framework of interact­ing, dynamic systems in which contributing relations among the members of the system have equal importance and in which change is the only constant. Table 1-4 summarizes some important principles of this theory.

Because systems are dynamic and their members are active organisms, the latter are constantly changing the environment, and this brings about some interesting contradictions. According to Piaget, development occurs as a result of the contra­dictions between what the individual knows and the existing environment. However, as Sameroff (1989) points out, the contradiction may become com­pounded, for "the act of knowing is already changing what one is trying to know" (p. 226). On this view, the challenge the young child faces in trying to understand and interact with his environment is formidable. On the other hand, the support his environment gives him in the form of continuing interrelations with members of the systems and subsystems within which he functions can help him meet the chal­lenge. Systems theory has been applied to a variety of developmental issues, includ­ing motor development, perception, language, cognition, and social behavior (Smith & Thelen, 1993); we discuss some of these efforts in later chapters (see Table 1-4).

According to Fogel (1993), one of the problems that psychologists have with systems thinking is that it "democratizes the process of developmental change" (p. 49). From a systems perspective, the brain and central nervous system are not the absolute rulers of the human being, nor are the genes the sole determinants of human development. For example, Fogel says, the organism inherits not only its parents' genes but the genes' environment, that is, the original cell (the zygote, which we will meet in Chapter 3) created by the act of sexual reproduction, in which the genes reside. Thus because the genes are already interacting with an environment as the organism that has been created begins to grow, the organism has inherited developmental processes, not simply genes. Again we see that the emphasis of dynamic systems theory is on process: "life is process, not substance" (Weiss, quoted in Fogel, 1993, p. 47). The actions of a system and its members are constantly changing in response to ongoing interactions within the system as well as among the system and other systems and their members. We will encounter many different applications of systems theory later in the book; in the next section we look at one particularly influential application, that of Urie Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory.

 

Complexity Each part of a system is unique but also related to one or more of the system's other parts. For example, an extended family comprises individual members ­mother, brother, niece-and subsystems-a married couple; their daughter and her husband and children; their son and his wife and children. Each family member and family subsystem influences and is influenced not only by each other member and subsystem but by the relationships among different members and subsystems. Wholeness and Organization The whole system is organized and more than just the sum of its parts. Its collective behavior can be described in terms that do not necessarily apply to the system's parts and their interrelationships. To understand a family system's functio