Introduction

• Development, both physical and mental, requires an appropriate context.
• An abnormal context may result in abnormal development. Some examples:
1. Victor, "the wild boy of Aveyron"
2. Genie
3. Infants raised in institutions. Recent examples are from Eastern Europe.
• Contexts of development include variations in genes, culture, family relations, and economic circumstances, which all contribute to developmental differences.

An Overview of Developmental Contexts

• Urie Bronfenbrenner's Ecological Theory outlines the complexity of contextual influences on development by means of a model depicting three concentric rings around the child at the center, where each ring influences all the rings inside of it.
1. Biological Makeup
2. Immediate Environment
3. Social and Economic Context
4. Cultural Context

The Child's Biological Makeup

• Three components influence the center of the model, the child's biological makeup:
1. The evolutionary heritage shared by all humans.
2. The child's individual genetic inheritance.
3. The biological results of interactions between genes and environment.
• The Human Evolutionary Heritage
1. We have a fairly precise timetable for many developmental milestones.
2. We have a strong disposition to act upon the environment, to be curious rather than passive.
3. We have an innate propensity for learning simple (e.g., sucking) and complex (e.g., language) skills.
4. We have a predisposition to be social, to form bonds.
• Individual genetic differences have allowed our species to meet environmental challenges over hundreds of thousands of years. There are direct and indirect effects of individual genetic makeup.
• There are interactions between genes and the environment. An important question pertains to the degree to which genes constrain environmental influences (canalization).

The Child's Immediate Environment

• The Family Context
1. The family is the dominant part of a child's immediate environment, forming first social relationships and providing models for behavior.
• The Family as a System
1. Researchers have moved beyond a focus on maternal caregiving to now include fathers, siblings, and the extended family.
2. The family is an interconnected system-each member's behavior depends in part on the behavior of the others.
3. Bidirectional effects - parents shape children's behavior and children's characteristics influence parent's behavior.
4. Sameroff's Transactional Model - cumulative effects of ongoing bidirectional influences.
• Characteristics of Family Systems
1. Made up of many subsystems joined together in a coherent, interlocking network.
2. A family is a dynamic, open system, subject to change as well as continuity.
3. They are subject to cyclical influences that can be repeated across generations.
• Fathers in the Family System
1. Direct (e.g., attachment) and indirect influences (e.g., marital harmony) are considered important.
• Siblings in the Family System
1. Aid in development of social understanding.

Immediate Contexts Outside the Family

• The Day-Care Setting - increase in use of day care in the U.S.
1. 1 in 4 are cared for by grandparent or other relative. 1 in 5 are cared for by father at home. About 1 in 5 are cared for by a nonrelative such as an individual babysitter or a family day-care provider.
2. Researchers have noted no negative effects of full-time day care for toddlers and preschoolers. It can promote cognitive and social development if high quality. The debate continues regarding day care for those under one year of age.
• The Peer Group
1. Teaches how to interact in equal-status, or symmetrical relationships.
2. Reinforces values, beliefs, and behavior standards that are part of the child's culture.
• The Neighborhood
1. Community income levels have been a research focus.
2. Influence via collective socialization where adults provide role models and monitoring for local children; social networks.
• The School
1. Instructor in cultural norms and values.
2. How the school is run and how teachers interact with students can affect how positive the school experience is for children.

The Social and Economic Context

• The second ring of Bronfenbrenner's model contains the following: community in which the child's immediate environment exists; social institutions, health-care systems, and religious organizations; social and economic conditions in the community and in the larger society (e.g., birth rates, income levels).
• The social and economic context affects children directly and indirectly.
• Family Changes Caused by Social and Economic Factors
1. Maternal Employment and Its Effects
• How maternal employment effects the child depends on the child's age, amount of time mother spends at work, quality of shared time remaining, quality of substitute care, strength of the parent-child relationship, and the meaning of the woman's employment to both herself and her husband.
• Mothers who are unhappy with their situation, especially dissatisfied nonworking mothers, have more problems child rearing than those who are satisfied.
• If the husband is displeased with the wife's employment, he may have more negative feelings toward his children and parenting responsibilities.
2. Single Parenting and Its Effects
• Unmarried Mothers
1. Rate of births to unmarried mothers increased from 11% in 1970 to 32% in 1995. 30% of these births are to women under age 20.
2. Children of unmarried adolescent mothers often have developmental problems, show higher rates of school failure, delinquency, early sexual activity, and pregnancy. Much of these outcomes could be influenced by poverty factors.
3. Social support, family support, and finishing high school are important for reducing potential developmental problems.
• Divorced Parents
1. Each year 1 million U.S. children are involved in divorce.
2. Outcome issues depend on child's age, sex, personality, quality of home life and parenting, and resources available to both parents and child.
3. Divorce that ends parental conflict is generally better for children than a conflict-based marriage. Divorce with continued conflict is worse than marriage with conflict.
4. Ongoing contact with the noncustodial parent (usually dad) generally reduces the negative consequences of divorce (with low conflict between the parents).
5. Children's adjustment to parental remarriage can take several years. Conflict is higher between children and stepparents, especially stepmothers.
6. Adjustment to stepparents is more difficult for adolescents.
3. Other Nontraditional Families
• Homosexual parents are as involved with their children as are heterosexual parents.
• Being raised by homosexual parents results in no obvious differences in gender identity, sex-role behavior, sexual orientation, and does not appear to place the child at risk for psychological problems.
• Socioeconomic Status and the Family
1. Socioeconomic Status (SES), the grouping of people within a society on the basis of income, occupation, and education, is another important aspect of social and economic context.
• Differences in parenting styles have been noted between working-class and middle-class parents.
• Poor quality childcare cuts across socioeconomic lines.
2. Poverty and Child Development
• Nearly 14.5 million U.S. children lived in poverty in 1996. This is 1 in 5 children overall but the rate is twice that for Hispanic and African American children than for White children.
• Persistent poverty has consequences for child development. These children score lower on IQ, vocabulary, and achievement tests. They are more likely to repeat grades, be placed in special education, drop out of high school, have higher rates of behavior problems and delinquency.
• Why? Inadequate prenatal care, prenatal drug exposure, and low birth weight set the stage for later cognitive deficits. Lead exposure and lower cognitive stimulation at home intensify the early effects.
• Poor families experience more stress. They are more likely to be exposed to a string of negative events and to chronic problems. Parents then may be more depressed, irritable, and distracted which has negative consequences for parenting.
• Poverty can be a self-perpetuating cycle. This has been highlighted in research on the inner-city African Americans living in ghettos.
• Intervention programs like Head Start can make a difference.
3. Homelessness
• Homelessness carries a particularly strong set of risks for children.
• In 1997, 36 % of those in homeless shelters were families with children.
• Homeless women are least likely to receive prenatal care and have higher rates of low birth weight infants as well as higher infant mortality rates.
• Homeless children suffer from more health problems and are least likely to receive proper immunizations, they experience more stress, more disruptions in school and friendships, and have higher rates of behavior problems.
4. Unemployment and Family Relationships
• Job loss and its hardships tend to increase conflict and violence in families, including child abuse.

The Cultural Context

• The cultural context is the third ring in Bronfenbrenner's model.
• Culture - a system of beliefs, attitudes, values, and guidelines for behavior. Different cultures tend to produce different patterns of personality characteristics, cognitive skills, and social relationships.
1. Cultural Influences
• We all have the same human biological inheritance and the same fundamental need for care. Adults in all cultures must 1) provide for infants with basic nurturance needed for development, and 2) must prepare children to function as adults in their particular social world by passing on rules, standards, and values of the culture via socialization.
• Socialization occurs by means of explicit and implicit instruction. The values of a culture are often reflected in the structure of the settings in which children spend their time (e.g., Chinese vs. U.S. nursery school environments).
• Children's behavior also reflects the values and demands of their culture (see Madsen's study on competition vs. cooperation in a game).
• Children in nonindustrialized cultures show more nurturant and responsible behaviors due to the tasks they are given while those in industrialized cultures are more dependent and self-centered since most do not contribute to family survival. Egoism may be an asset in cultures that depend on personal profit for economic growth.
2. Cultural Change and Child Development
• Parenting practices have changed over the decades and centuries as economic life patterns have changed.
• China is a recent example of rapid cultural change (family-centered to state-centered shift).
3. Subcultures
• Subcultures - groups whose beliefs, attitudes, values, and guidelines for behavior differ in some ways from those of the dominant culture. Sometimes a child's subculture clashes with that of the dominant culture, which can result in difficulties in the classroom, for example.

Development as Context

• Development provides a context in two ways:
1. It gives each person a developmental history, which influences the course of future development (e.g., Erikson's theory).
2. Development provides a context for future development because children change physically and intellectually as they mature. These transformations dramatically influence how children interact with their environments.

Contexts in Interaction

• Central message of the chapter: human development always occurs within a set of contexts. None of the contexts exists in isolation. An example of this interaction is maternal employment.
• Certain environmental factors tend to be grouped.
• All the environmental influences are funneled through the family to some extent.