Child Development Theories and Examples

A Diagnosis

Why has the study of cognitive development repeatedly fallen back on approaches that focus primarily on either the child or the environment? Why have developmentalists failed to build approaches based on the collaboration of child with environment?
Historically, developmental psychology has been plagued by repeated failures to accept what should be one of its central tasks: to explain the emergence of new organization or structure. These failures have most commonly taken either of two complementary forms. In one form, nativism, the structures evident in the adult are seen as already preformed in the infant. These structures need only be expressed when they are somehow stimulated or nourished at the appropriate time in development. In the second form, environmentalism, the structures in the adult are treated as already preformed in the environment. These structures need only be internalized by some acquisition process, such as conditioning or imitation. Typically, structuralist approaches assume some form of nativism, and functionalist approaches assume some type of environmentalism.
Although it is common to focus on the difference between nativism and environmentalism, there is a fundamental similarity, a common preformism.
Both approaches reduce the phenomena of development to the realization of preformed structures. The mechanisms by which the structures are realized are clearly different, but in both cases the structures are present somewhere from the start—either in the child or in the world (Feffer, 1982; Fischer, 1980; Sameroff, 1975; Silvern, 1984; Westerman, 1980).
A mature developmental theory, we believe, must move beyond explanation by reduction to preexisting forms. It must build constructs that explain how child and environment collaborate in development, and one of the primary tasks of such constructs must be to explain how new structures emerge in development (Bullock, 1981; Dennett, 1975; Haroutunian, 1983).
If the future is not to be a reenactment of the past, it is important to ask why it has been so difficult to avoid drifting toward one or another type of preformism. Why has no well-articulated, compelling alternative to preformism been devised? Any compelling alternative to preformism must describe how child and environment collaborate to produce new structures during development. Constructing such a framework is an immensely difficult task. At the very least, the framework must make reference to cognitive structure, environmental structure, the interaction of the two, and mechanisms for change in structure. The scope of these issues makes such a framework difficult to formulate and difficult to communicate once formulated.
Unfortunately, even approaches that have explicitly attempted to move beyond preformist views have typically failed to do so. Piaget provides a case in point. He set out expressly to build an interactionist position, an approach that would deal with both child and environment and thus avoid the pitfalls of nativism and environmentalism (Piaget, 1947/1950). Yet the theory he eventually built placed most of its explanatory weight on the child and neglected the environment.
Consider, for example, his famous digestive metaphor for cognitive development. Just as the digestive system assimilates food to the body and accommodates to the characteristics of the particular type of food, so children assimilate an object or event to one of their schemes and accommodate the scheme to the object or event. Piaget seems to have chosen this metaphor expressly as a device to avoid preformist thinking, yet he still drifted back toward preformism. In practice, the focus for applications of the metaphor was the assimilation of experience to preexisting schemes. The other side of the metaphor—accommodation to experience—was systematically neglected. For example, Piaget (1936/1952, 1975) differentiated many different types of assimilation but generally spoke of accommodation in only global, undifferentiated terms.
Similarly, the structures behind Piaget's developmental stages—concrete operations and formal operations in school-age children—were treated as static characteristics of the child. The environment was granted an ill-defined role in supporting the emergence of the structures, but the structures themselves were treated as if they came to be fixed characteristics of the child's mind (Piaget and Inhelder, 1966/1969). In a genuinely interactionist position, these structures would have been attributed to the collaboration of the mind with particular contexts. Piaget's neglect of the environment became particularly evident when he was faced with a host of environmentally induced cases of developmental unevenness (termed horizontal decal-age). His response was that it was simply impossible to explain them (Piaget, 1971:11). Because of Piaget's neglect of the environment, even supporters of his position have argued that it is essentially nativist (Beilin, 1971; Broughton, 1981; Flavell, 1971).