Child Development Theories and Examples

Integrating Across Traditional Research Categories

In the same way that scholars are coming to treat child and environment as collaborators in development they are recognizing the need to integrate the traditional categories for categorizing behavior. Cognition and emotion, for example, are not separate in the developing child. There seem to be at least three reasons for this changing orientation.
First, after decades of research, developmentalists have found that a child's behavior does not fit neatly into separate boxes labeled cognition, emotion, motivation, social skills, personality, and physical development (see, for example, Harter, 1982, 1983; Selman, 1980). Indeed, even behavior in more restricted, intuitively appealing categories such as perspective taking and conservation does not fit together coherently (see Hooper et al., 1971; Rubin, 1973; Uzgiris, 1964). Behavioral development has not proved to follow the "obvious" categories devised by developmentalists.
Second, the general movement toward integrating diverse approaches and dealing with the whole child leads not only to an emphasis on the collaboration of child and environment but also to the consideration of relations between behaviors in the traditional categories: How does emotional development relate to cognitive development? How does social development relate to cognitive development? Instead of one set of researchers studying a cognitive child, while another set studies a social child, and still another set studies an emotional child, the field is moving toward viewing the child as a whole—a cognitive, social, emotional, motivated, personal, biological child.
Third, during the last 20 years the cognitive-developmental orientation has become a dominant influence in the study of development, and it has provided a major impetus toward integration. The central questions in the study of cognitive development involve the organization of behavior and the processes underlying behavioral change. Because these questions are so general and fundamental, their applicability is not limited to the traditional domain of cognitive development—increments in knowledge about "cold" topics, such as objects, space, and scientific principles. All behavior, including that involving "hot" topics, such as emotions and social interaction, is organized in some way and undergoes developmental change.
The movement toward integration across behavioral categories has been promising, and many interesting results have come from research in this new tradition. But thus far progress has been limited by several conceptual difficulties.