Western Theories of Child Development
The study of child development began to grow and evolve during the twentieth century as researchers paid more attention to childhood, educational practices and human behaviour. The following is a review of some of the major Western theoretical approaches that have been used in the field of child development.
Psychoanalytic Theories
Psychoanalytic theorists believe that to understand behaviour, we must analyze what the behaviour means or symbolizes and how unconscious forces motivate behaviour. Psychoanalytic theorists emphasize that our early experiences, particularly those with our parents or other significant individuals, have a major influence on our life-long development. Emphasis is on the role of the unconscious, or that which is beyond our awareness.
| Proponents | Theoretical Premise |
|---|---|
| Sigmund Freud (1856 – 1939) | Freud outlined five psychosexual stages that refer to the sexual drives that an individual experiences from birth through adolescence. Parents play a role in helping the child manage the conflict between these biological drives and societal expectations. |
| Erik Erikson | Erikson adapted Freud’s theory with an outline of eight psychosocial conflicts that peopleexperience from birth through the end of life, relating to the individual’s social relationships. |
Freud’s Psychosexual Theory of Development
Freud’s theory proposes five stages of personality development from infancy to adolescence. During each stage, the individual must deal with conflicts between their urges for pleasure and the social demands of their environment. Across the stages, the biological and sexual urges shift from the mouth (infancy), to the anus (early childhood), to the genitals (adolescence). Freud believed that personality development is based on how well the individual resolves these conflicts across the stages.
| Stage | Characteristics |
|---|---|
| Oral Stage | Takes place during the first 18 months of life. The infant’s pleasure centres around the mouth. Sucking, chewing and biting are the infant’s main sources of pleasure and these actions reduce tension. According to Freudian theory, if these needs are not met, a baby may grow up to be a nail biter, or a smoker. |
| Anal Stage | Between 18-months and three-years the child’s greatest pleasure involves the anus and the bowel movements associated with it. |
| Phallic Stage | Takes place between the ages of three and six. Its name comes from the Latin word phallus, which means “penis”. During this stage, the site of pleasure shifts to the genitals; boys develop sexual attachment to their mothers and girls to their fathers. According to Freud, during this stage the young child develops an intense desire to replace the parent of the same sex and enjoy the affections of the opposite-sex parent. |
| Latency Stage | Children between six-years and adolescence resolve their anxiety by identifying with the same-sex parent. Freud believed that children in this stage repress their sexuality and focus on acquiring social and intellectual skills and abilities. |
| Genital Stage | Begins with the onset of puberty and carries on throughout adult life. The physical changes brought on by puberty reignite the sexual urges of the phallic stage and the genitals again become the source of pleasure. |
Freud believed that personality is made up of the id, the ego and the superego. The id includes our instincts, which are present at birth. It operates on the pleasure principle, seeking immediate gratification. As children are faced with the demands and constraints of reality, the ego emerges. The ego tries to seek out acceptable means of gratification. The superego is the conscience or moral structure of personality. It takes into account whether something is wrong or right and is often in conflict with the demands of the id. According to Freud, the superego emerges around the age of six, after the child identifies with the same-sex parent.
Freud’s theory of personality development and the psychosexual stages of development contributed to our views and understanding of human development. He influenced the acceptance of the case study method (detailed look at an individual or group) and inspired research into many areas of human development, including early infant-caregiver relationships. Freud’s emphasis on the importance of early experiences in shaping personality has influenced many theorists. However, his work and research were constrained by gender and cultural biases, and therefore many of Freud’s assumptions must be questioned.
Erikson’s Psychosocial Theory
Erik Erikson worked as a Freudian psychoanalyst in Vienna, before fleeing Nazism and coming to United States in 1933. His professional and personal experiences influenced his views and extended and expanded Freud’s theories. He became the most important neo-Freudian in the field of child development.
Erikson (1950) accepted Freud’s view of the importance of the unconscious and of early childhood but he shifted the focus from psychosexual stages to psychosocial stages of development. His professional work in the United States led him to view Freud’s stages as too limited. Instead, Erickson proposed eight developmental stages from birth to death. Each stage is defined by a particular developmental challenge that is central to that particular stage of the life cycle and must be resolved.
Erikson’s first five stages are closely aligned with Freud’s stages, but there is a significant difference in their emphasis on the individual’s relationship to the social environment. Erikson’s psychosocial theory of human development emphasized cultural and social influences; Freud argued that an individual’s personality is shaped during the first years of life, while Erikson emphasized change throughout the life cycle, in the following stages:
| Stage | Characteristics |
|---|---|
| Trust versus Mistrust | During the first year of life, babies learn to trust that others will care for their basic needs, including nourishment, warmth and physical comfort most of the time. For those infants whose feelings of discomfort or fear and apprehension outweigh their sense of trust that the world is a good and safe place, the outcome of the “crisis” will be negative, and mistrust or lack of confidence in the care of others develops. |
| Autonomy versus Shame and Doubt | During the second and third years of life, children learn either to be self-sufficient in many activities, such as toileting, feeding, walking, and talking or to doubt their own abilities. Older infants and toddlers start to assert their independence or autonomy in discovering how to do things on their own. At the same time, they will experience some doubt about their fledgling abilities. Too much restraint or harsh punishment will defeat the growing sense of autonomy and a sense of shame and doubt will take over. |
| Initiative versus Guilt | During the preschool years, children come in contact with a broader, more challenging social world. Children now take on more responsibility and initiative for their bodies, their behaviour, their belongings and maybe younger siblings. They want to undertake many adult-like activities. At times, they will overstep their abilities and the limits set by parents and other adults. If a child is made to feel quite anxious when he or she is irresponsible, guilty feelings may arise and dominate. |
| Industry versus Inferiority | Erikson’s fourth stage approximately coincides with the middle childhood years when children are in elementary school. They direct their energy and attention to building physical skills, mastering knowledge, and acquiring intellectual skills. A sense of inferiority—of feeling incompetent and unproductive—develops if children feel that the are unable to do anything well |
| Identity versus Role Confusion | During adolescence, individuals try to determine who they are, and what they will do in life. Adolescents are faced with many new roles and try to establish sexual, political, and career identities. If they are able to explore roles in a healthy manner and find a positive path to follow in life, an identity will be achieved. However, if they are unable to adequately explore different pathways, or if an identity in pushed on them by parents or others, they may become confused about what roles to play and what path to follow. |
| Intimacy versus Isolation | During Erikson’s sixth stage, young adults seek companionship and romantic love to form close friendships and an intimate relationship with another person. If this does not happen, young adults often become isolated from others, fearing rejection and disappointment. |
| Generativity versus Stagnation | During middle adulthood, individuals want to help the younger generation through meaningful work, creative activity, and/or raising a family. The feeling of doing nothing to contribute to the next generation is stagnation. |
| Integrity versus Despair | In the eighth and final stage of late adulthood, older adults try to make sense out of their lives. If, overall, an individual feels his or her life has been well spent and meaningful, a sense of integrity will prevail. It many of the earlier stages were resolved negatively, older adults are likely to feel despair. |
In Erikson’s psychosocial theory, the resolution of each stage or developmental crisis is the product of the interaction of the individual’s characteristics and the support provided by the social environment.
Behaviourism and Social Learning Theory
These theoretical approaches view human development as continuous, rather than occurring in stages. The assumption is that development is a result of learning, which is a long-lasting change in behaviour based on experience or adaptation to the environment. Behaviourism emphasizes the study of observable behaviour and how the environment shapes behaviour. Behaviorists believed children were shaped by the environment and that all of their behavior, including their cognitive activities, were a result of external forces in the environment. Social learning/cognitive theory is based on the idea that children’s social behavior and cognitive processes are a result of the adaptation to and learning from their environments.
| Proponents | Theoretical Premise |
|---|---|
| Ivan Pavlov (1849 – 1936) | Behaviourism is concerned with behaviours that can be directly observed and objectively measured. Pavlov’s research on classical conditioning focused on animal’s reflexes and conditioned stimuli. |
| John B. Watson (1849 – 1958) | Watson was another early behaviourist. He studied whether the classical conditioning principles of learning applied to young children. |
| B.F. Skinner (1904 – 1990) | Skinner studied the effects of rewards and punishments on behaviours in animals and people. His approach, operant conditioning, became broadly applied in child psychology. |
| Albert Bandura | Bandura is recognized as the originator of social learning theory. Bandura believes that cognitive processes are important mediators of environment-behaviour connections. His research focuses observational learning or learning that occurs through watching what others do. |
Early Behaviourism
Ivan Pavlov, a Russian physiologist, conducted a number of experiments with animals, specifically focusing on learning (Cleverly & Phillips, 1986). Pavlov knew that dogs would salivate when they are given food. He also observed that dogs would salivate before they actually tasted the food, when they anticipated being fed. He saw this as an indicator that the dogs had learned to associate those things preceding being fed (the presence of the trainer) the neutral stimulus, with another stimulus (food), that then produces a reflexive response (salivating). Pavlov designed experiments with the animals that conditioned them to respond to the sound of a bell with salivating, teaching classical conditioning to the dogs.
| Pavlov’s classical conditiong experiments | |
|---|---|
| Before conditioning | Ringing the bell caused no response from the dog. Placing food in front of the dog initiated salivation. |
| During conditioning | The bell was rung a few seconds before the dog was presented with food. |
| After conditioning | The ringing of the bell alone produced salivation. |
Pavlov’s work included other principles, including: Stimulus Generalization: Once the dog has learned to salivate at the sound of the bell, it will salivate at other similar sounds. Extinction: If you stop pairing the bell with the food, salivation will eventually cease in response to the bell. Spontaneous Recovery: Extinguished responses can be “recovered” after an elapsed time, but will soon extinguish again if the dog is not presented with food. Discrimination: The dog could learn to discriminate between similar bells (stimuli) and discern which bell would result in the presentation of food and which would not. Higher-Order Conditioning: Once the dog has been conditioned to associate the bell with food, another unconditioned stimulus, such as a light may be flashed at the same time that the bell is rung. Eventually the dog will salivate at the flash of the light without the sound of the bell.
John B. Watson was an American behaviorist that applied Ivan Pavlov’s classical conditioning theories to young children. He believed that a child is shaped completely by their experiences and environment. Watson described a newborn as a “lively squirming bit of flesh, capable of making a few simple responses… Parents take this raw material and begin to fashion it…” (Watson, 1928, 9. 46).
Watson taught Albert, an 11 month-old-infant, to fear a soft white rat. He presented the rat to Albert accompanied by a sharp loud noise several times. Albert initially reached out to touch the furry rat, while the noise by itself scared him. After several presentations of the neutral stimulus (the rat) and the unconditioned stimulus (the noise), Albert cried and turned his head away from the rat even if the noise was not present. The neutral stimulus (the rat) had become a conditioned stimulus that produced the same reaction or response (fear) as the unconditioned stimulus (loud noise). Albert’s fear was intense and he became fearful of other furry objects.
Watson and his colleagues concluded from this and other findings that the environment was the primary force in child development. He believed that adults could mould children’s behaviour in any way by controlling stimulus-response associations.
Another form of behaviourism emerged from the work of B.F. Skinner. Skinner studied behavioural reinforcements. He discovered that particular behaviours in animals (such as running through a maze or tapping a lever) could be increased if they resulted in a positive/reinforcing outcome. If behaviours consistently resulted in aversive/negative outcomes, they would decrease. He applied this approach, to children’s behaviour and found similar results. Skinner called his approach, operant conditioning, because the individual “operates” on the environment. In other words, an individual’s actions have outcomes and these outcomes lead people to later act in ways that will produce positive consequence. Skinner’s operant conditioning principles became broadly applied in child psychology.
Operant conditioning makes three assumptions: 1. Each infant is born with reflexes that are specific to its species. 2. The infant is born as a “blank slate” (tabula rasa) that immediately starts to be “written on” by the environment when the infant interacts with people and objects. 3. The infant does not just passively react but rather actively participates in learning (Green and Piel, 2002).
Social Learning Theory
Social learning theorists agree with behaviourists that development is learned and influenced by environmental experiences. However, they also contend that cognition is a key factor in development. Like behaviourists, social learning theorists emphasize the importance of empirical research in studying children’s development. The focus of the research is on the social and cognitive factors that influence children’s behaviour.
Canadian psychologist Albert Bandura proposed the theory of social learning. His research included observational learning, imitating or modeling what others do. Bandura believed that individuals learn through observing what others do and then try and adopt this behavior for themselves. For example, if a 3 year old observes a child on the playground using aggression to get his way, the child may imitate this behavior in the hopes of achieving the same results.
The research findings of Bandura’s and other social learning theorists are often used to explain the impact of television violence on young viewers (Bandura et al, 1963). In a now classic “Bobo the doll” experiment, Bandura and his colleagues demonstrated how aggressive incidents viewed on a television screen could have an impact on the behaviour of preschool children (see box below).
In a classic experiment, Albert Bandura and his colleagues (1963) demonstrated the power of example. The researchers selected 96 children ages 3 to 5.75 years and divided them into four groups. Each group included 12 boys and 12 girls, and had the same proportion of children who had been rated aggressive by their nursery school teachers.
The children from the first group saw an adult (half saw a man and half saw a woman) playing with a three-foot high rubber clown by hitting it on the head with a hammer, sitting on it and punching it in the nose while making aggressive statements, such as “Sock him!” The second group saw a movie of the same adults behaving in the same way. The children in the third group saw an animated cartoon film of a woman dressed in a cat costume in a fantasyland setting, attacking the same clown in the same way. The fourth group did not see a real-life, movie, or cartoon example of aggressive behaviour.
Each of the children in the first three groups viewed the model or film individually. After, children from all four groups were deliberately frustrated; each was allowed to play with an intriguing toy for a few moments and then told that he or she could not continue to play with that toy.
In the final part of the experiment each child was allowed to play for twenty minutes with several other toys, including dolls, crayons, trucks, dart guns, and a rubber clown just like the one the adult had attacked. An observer watched each child and rated his or her behaviour every five minutes, for a total of 240 time samples for each child.
The results were clear. The children who had seen the model played much more aggressively than those who had not; many duplicated almost every detail of the attack on the clown. They also played with the more aggressive toys. These children were more likely to choose to shoot the dart gun than draw with the crayons.
The children who saw the real-life adult behaved aggressively an average of 83 times over the 20-minute period. Those who saw the real-life model on a film were more aggressive, acting aggressively an average of 92 times. The children who viewed the cartoon were aggressive an average of 99 times. In comparison, the children who saw no model of aggression were observed to be aggressive 54 times over the 20-minute period.
The results were subdivided by sex to see whether there was a difference in the behaviour of boys and girls. First, regardless of the type of model, boys behaved in a more aggressive manner than girls. Second, if the children viewed a model that was the same sex as themselves, they behaved in a more aggressive manner. They were more likely to imitate the behaviour of someone of the same sex. Third, the group of children who viewed the cartoon were, on average, the most aggressive in their play immediately following the viewing.
The conclusions of this study were that children imitate the behaviour they see, especially if they identify with the model, whether in real life, a realistic movie, or a cartoon.
Social learning theorists, like Bandura, differ from Skinner by emphasizing that children can regulate and control their own behaviour. A child who observes an older sibling behaving in a sarcastic and dominating manner may find the behaviour distasteful and make a conscious effort to be encouraging and supportive toward her younger sister. An individual’s thoughts or cognition may encourage self-control and resistance to environmental influence. Bandura later referred to this perspective as the social cognitive theory.
According to this perspective, children become increasingly selective in what they imitate. From watching others praise themselves and from feedback about their own actions from others, children develop personal standards for behaviour and self-efficacy (a belief in their own ability to control their actions and environment) that guide their responses in particular situations (Bandura, 1997).
Cognitive theories
The theories in this section, while quite different from each other, share a common emphasis on children’s conscious thoughts. They discuss the structure and development of an individual’s thought processes with a focus on how thinking develops and affects an individual’s understanding of the world.
| Proponents | Theoretical Premise |
|---|---|
| Jean Piaget (1896 – 1980) | With his cognitive-developmental theory, Piaget stressed that children actively construct their own knowledge as they manipulate and explore their world, and their cognitive development takes place in stages. He believed that children adapt their thinking to include new ideas and that the additional information furthers understanding. |
| Lev Vygotsky (1896 – 1934) | Vygotsky recognized that children’s cognitive and language development do not happen in isolation. Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory of human development focuses on how culture (the values, beliefs, customs, skills and tools of a social group) is transmitted or passed on to the next generation |
| Various | Information processing theory looks at human cognition using the model of a computer that receives, processes and uses information to make decisions. |
Piaget’s Cognitive-Developmental Theory
Piaget’s cognitive-developmental theory first came to the attention of North American psychologists in the 1930’s but it did not gain much attention until the 1960’s (Ginsburg & Opper, 1979). His view of children as active participants in their cognitive development was at odds with the dominant behaviourist perspective, which viewed children as passive and knowledge as something that was learned through reinforcement. For Piaget, a child’s cognitive development was a continuous construction of increasingly complex psychological or mental structures, which he called “schemes”. He viewed cognitive development as the result of the interaction between the developing child and the surrounding environment.
Piaget’s theories have become the underpinnings for most developmental child psychology research and educational practice since the 1960’s. At the same time North America was working towards improving the environments and intellectual achievements of children, Piaget’s theories helped to create understanding and support that direction.
According to Piaget, two central processes of cognition underlie an individual’s construction of their world: organization and adaptation. We organize our observations and experiences to make sense of our world. We connect ideas together and distinguish between more important and less important experiences. We also rearrange ideas or schemes, linking them with other ideas to create an interconnected cognitive system. We also adapt our thinking to take in new ideas, which further our understanding and knowledge.
Piaget identified two methods of adaptation of new information: assimilation – the incorporation of new information, gained from observation or experiences, into existing knowledge; and accommodation – the adjustment of thinking or knowledge to incorporate new information.
Piaget proposed that children revise their ideas about the world in an effort to maintain equilibrium or a balance between their internal understanding of the world and the information they receive from their ongoing experiences and interactions with their surrounding environment.
Piaget’s theory identifies four broad stages of cognitive development from infancy through adolescence. Each stage is age-related and is characterized by a distinct way of thinking.
| Stage | Characteristics |
|---|---|
| Sensorimotor Birth to 2 years | The infant moves from reflexive patterns of behaviour to the beginning of symbolic thought. Infants “think” by acting on the world through their senses and their movements. |
| Preoperational 2 to 7 years | Children use symbols to represent earlier sensorimotor thinking. Symbolic thinking is reflected in the development of language and makebelieve play. Thinking is illogical. |
| Concrete Operational 7 to 11 years | Children’s thinking about specific events becomes logical. They are able to perform concrete operations such as grouping objects into classes and subclasses. |
| Formal Operational 11 to 15 year and beyond | Adolescents acquire the capacity for abstraction and are able to reason with symbols that do not refer to objects in the real world. |
In Piaget’s theories, it is the different quality of thinking which makes each successive stage more advanced than the previous one, not the quantity or amount of information (Ginsberg & Opper, 1979).
Vygotsky’s Sociocultural Theory
Early in the twentieth century, the Russian psychologist, Lev Vygotsky recognized that a child’s cognitive and language development does not happen in isolation. However, his ideas and theories did not gain much prominence in North America until towards the end of the century. Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory of human development focuses on how culture (the values, beliefs, customs, skills and tools of a social group) is transmitted or passed on to the next generation.
According to Vygotsky, cognitive processes and skills are socially transferred from knowledgeable members of society to children. He believed that social interactions, particularly cooperative dialogues between and among children and adults, were necessary to acquire ways of thinking and behaving. As adults and more expert peers help children master activities that are meaningful to that culture, the communication becomes part of children’s thinking. When children internalize the basic features of these dialogues, or conversations, they are able to use the language themselves to guide their activities and to acquire skills on their own (Berk, 1994).
Once children are able to use language, they are able to communicate with others and their social interactions result in continuous changes to cognitive abilities. The specific cognitive abilities vary considerably from culture to culture and are not bound by a universal sequence or stages of cognitive development. Vygotsky emphasized that the development of higher cognitive abilities, such as memory, attention, and reasoning involve learning to use the inventions of society, such as language, mathematical systems, and memory devices.
Vygotsky noticed that there were some tasks that were too difficult for children to master alone but that could be mastered with the guidance and assistance of an adult or more-skilled child. He labeled the distance between these two points as the “zone of proximal development”. The lower limit of the zone of proximal development is the level of problem solving reached by a child working independently. The upper limit is the level of additional skill the child can master with the assistance of a more skilled individual.
According to Vygotsky, speech influences cognition. The learning of language (or signs) is brought about by social processes, and language ultimately make thought possible. Therefore, when a child is an infant, at the preverbal stage of development, his/her intelligence is a purely natural, useful capacity. As a child begins to develop so does his/her language. As a child begins to speak, his/her thought processes also begin to develop. In essence, it is language that directs behaviour.
| Social speech | In “no way is this speech related to intellect or thinking” (Luria, 1992). In this stage a child uses speech to control the behaviour of others. A child uses speech to express simple thoughts and emotions such as crying, laughter, and shouting. An example of speech in this stage is “I want milk.” |
| Egocentric speech | Typical of a three to seven-year-old. “It serves as a bridge between the primitive and highly public social speech of the first stage and the more sophisticated and highly private inner speech of the third stage.” (Lefrancois, 1994) In this stage, children often talk to themselves, regardless of whether someone is listening to them. They think out loud in an attempt to guide their own behaviour. They may speak about what they are doing as they do it. An example of this type of speech is a child in school who counts out loud one block at a time saying each number as he/she goes along to get to five. |
| Inner speech | This is the final stage of speech development. It is inner, soundless speech. This is the type of speech used by older children and adults. This type of speech allows us to direct our thinking and behaviour. Once a child has reached this final stage he/she is able to engage in all forms of higher mental functions. In this stage one is able to count in one’s head, use logical memory, inherent relationships, and inner signs. |
Information Processing
In more recent decades, a number of human development researchers have taken a different perspective on cognitive development. Information processing theorists believe that human cognitive development is similar to computer processing in that we can analyze it step-by-step. Individuals are much more sophisticated than computers but the comparison helps us to understand that information processing theorists emphasize the study of human thinking and the mechanics involved. The belief is that an understanding of the mechanics of information processing would help us to better understand cognitive development (Siegler, 1994).
Information processing theorists propose that mental activities can be broken down into smaller pieces, such as: noticing, mentally manipulating, storing, combining, retrieving and acting on information. The processes in human information processing are quite complex, requiring the ability to store large amounts of information, access that information when needed, and analyze the information in order to problem solve. Information processing theory states that cognitive development is a continuous process of taking in and understanding information.
Ethology
Ethology, also referred to as behavioural biology, stresses that behaviour is strongly influenced by, is tied to evolution and is characterized by sensitive or critical periods (Hinde, 1992).
| Proponents | Theoretical Premise |
|---|---|
| Konrad Lorenz (1903 – 1989) | Lorenz studied animal behaviour and highlighted the importance of imprinting during the critical period right after birth. Imprinting refers to the early learning that takes place when the newborn animal follows and forms an attachment to the parent (or the first moving object seen after birth). |
| John Bowlby (1907 – 1990) Mary Ainsworth (1913 – 1999) | Attachment theory describes the bonding process between newborn and parent and the importance of early, healthy attachment for lifelong development. |
Ethology emerged as a theory of animal development through the work of European zoologists, especially Konrad Lorenz. Lorenz studied the behaviour patterns of graylag geese. Like many birds, a newly hatched gosling is born with an instinct to follow its mother. This behaviour is observed as soon as the gosling hatches out of the egg. The early following behaviours ensure that the baby birds stay close to the mother, are fed and protected from danger. This survival behavior is called, imprinting.
Lorenz was curious about the behaviour and set up experiments to observe the geese’s behaviour patterns. In a set of experiments, Lorenz separated the eggs of one goose into two groups. He returned one group to the goose to be hatched by her and the others were placed in an incubator to be hatched. The goslings in the first group followed their mother as soon as they were hatched. The second group saw Lorenz as soon as they were hatched and began to follow him everywhere, as though he was their mother. Lorenz then marked both groups of goslings and placed them under a box. The mother goose and Lorenz stood aside as the box was lifted. Those hatched in the incubator went right to Lorenz while those hatched by the mother gosling went to her.
From his observations and experiments, Lorenz learned that the development of imprinting took place for a brief period of time after the birds were hatched. This led to the concept of a critical period: a limited time span during which there is a biological readiness for certain behaviour to emerge, providing the necessary stimulation is available in the environment.
While Lorenz’s theories of imprinting and absolute critical periods for learning seemed too extreme to apply to human early development, The term “sensitive period” may be more appropriate to human development (Bornstein, 1989). A sensitive period is a time that is optimal for behaviour to emerge and the individual is particularly primed to respond to environmental stimulation. But the time period is more open-ended than the narrow time period of a critical period. In particular, neurological evidence is providing evidence of special time frames in early development.
Ethologists studying children, carefully observe social behaviour in natural surroundings (e.g. homes, playgrounds, schools, and child care centres) to learn about emotional expression, play, aggression, and cooperation (Hinde, 1992). The observations of imprinting prompted a British psychoanalyst, John Bowlby (1951), to apply ethological theory to the understanding of human infant-caregiver relationships. Bowlby studied war orphans after World War II and reported infant mental health depends on a warm, intimate relationship with a mother or mother-substitute. He emphasized that this relationship has to be ongoing and go beyond basic biological needs. He also put forth the idea that infants should have fun, which was not widely accepted at the time (Green and Piel, 2002).
Mary Ainsworth extended Bowlby’s work by conducting in-home observations of mothers and babies and also longitudinal studies of mother-infant interaction. She developed a specific testing methodology, “The Strange Situtation” that is done when the infant is between 11 and 18 months of age in eight steps. It involves different conditions in which the infant is in a room – sometimes alone, and sometimes with his/her parent/caregiver and/or a stranger (someone who is part of the experiment but unknown to the child). At each stage, the baby’s reactions are documented and then analyzed. Ainsworth outlined qualitatively different types of attachment using the strange situation:
| Type | Characteristics |
|---|---|
| Secure Attachment | The infant can explore by using the caregiver as a secure “base”, may show distress when the caregiver is absent but is quickly soothed when the caregiver return. Sensitive, responsive care leads to secure attachment. |
| Insecure Attachment | The infant explores without showing much interest in the caregiver, may show some distress when the caregiver is absent and then ignore the caregiver when s/he returns. This type of attachment can result from caregivers who are insensitive or unable to provide emotional support. |
| Insecure Ambivalent/ Resistant Attachment | The infant is very distressed and does very little activity when the caregiver is absent. When the caregiver returns, the infant neither soothes easily nor starts to explore. This results from caregivers who are very inconsistent in their responses to the baby’s needs. |
| A fourth attachment type was later added to Ainsworth’s theory: | |
| Disorganized/ Disoriented Attachment | The infant does not have a consistent response to the caregiver’s absence and may show both avoidant and resistant behaviours when the caregiver returns. The child’s confusion may result from caregivers who are both reassuring and frightening. |
While there has been some criticism of Ainsworth’s work for small sample size and lacking relevance in some cultures it has certainly contributed a unique research methodology in the Strange Situation. Ainsworth and Bowlby both advanced the study of infant behaviour in the twentieth century, by focusing on social needs over purely biological ones (Green and Piel, 2002).
Ecological Theory
| Proponents | Theoretical Premise |
|---|---|
| Urie Bronfenbrenner (1917 – 2005) | Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory considers the inputs of immediate and indirect dimensions of the environment in which children live. |
Urie Bronfenbrenner proposed a theory of human development that emphasizes how the environment influences a child’s development and how the developing child, in turn, influences the environment (Bronfenbrenner, 1979). This ecological system theory of human development has become one of the most influential theories in the past thirty years.
According to Bronfenbrenner, the child’s world is organized “as a set of nested structures, each inside the next, like a set of Russian dolls” (1979, p. 22). He wrote that the child is affected by their most immediate setting, the family, their neighborhoods, and also by more remote contexts such as the social policies that affect them. The developing child also affects those systems as he develops and grows. Bronfenbrenner described these different levels/systems:
- The microsystem is the setting in which the child lives or interacts. This context includes family, peers, child care setting, school, and neighbourhood. The child has direct interactions with the individuals she or he encounters in the immediate environment and is both influenced by and influences those individuals.
- The mesosystem is the interrelationships among the components of the microsystem. For example, parents interact with caregivers and teachers.
- The exosystem is made up of settings that influence a child’s development but do not have direct interactions with the child. For example, a parent’s workplace and co-workers affect the child’s life. If there are employee policies (such as family leave time or flexible work schedules for parents with young children) in place that value family life, the impact is likely to be more positive than if the parent is required to work long hours or to travel frequently. At the same time, the parent’s work place is affected if the child is often sick.
- The macrosystem that surrounds the first three systems represents ideological and institutional patterns of a particular culture or subculture. Children who grow up in an Indigenous community in northern Canada experience a different social ideology than children who grow up in a suburb outside of big city. Children who grow up in Canada experience a different social ideology than children who grow up in Italy or Africa or Scandinavia.
- The chronosystem is Bronfenbrenner’s term for the time-based dimension of his model. The micro-, meso-, exo- and macrosystems change over time. The chronosystem can alter the operation of all ecological levels. Over time both the child and her or his environment undergo change, and change can originate within the individual (e.g. severe injury or illness, puberty) or in the external world (e.g. birth of a sibling, starting at a child care centre, parental divorce, unemployment). Bronfenbrenner points out that both kinds of changes need to be taken into consideration to understand how the other components of his model shift and, in turn, how all these changes affect development.
Bronfenbrenner’s ecological theory views development as the result of the ever-changing child’s interaction with a changing matrix of ecological systems. He expanded his original theory to what he called a bioecological system. Bronfenbrenner realized that children’s biological and psychological differences affect how they respond to their environments (Bronfenbrenner, 1995). He was particularly interested in how children respond to the people who are important in their lives, such as parents. Bronfenbrenner came to the conclusion that these relationships, which he called proximal processes, were the basis of development. He realized that these relationships do not happen in isolation and are affected by all levels of the environment.
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