Child Development Theories and Examples

The Central Issues In The Field Today

The differences among the traditional approaches to development are important to understand, but they seem much less significant today than they did 10 years ago. A pervasive change in orientation seems to be taking place among behavioral scientists—a shift away from emphases on competing theories toward integrating whatever tools are available to explain behavior in the whole person, in all of his or her complexity. The present era seems to be a time of integrating rather than splitting. Structuralism and functionalism, for example, are seen not as competing approaches but as complementary ones, emphasizing different aspects of behavior and development. This new orientation is evident throughout this volume.
In the study of cognitive development, this change in the field appears to be associated with attempts to go beyond certain fundamental limitations of previous approaches and to move toward a more comprehensive framework for characterizing and explaining cognitive development. At least three basic questions have arisen as part of this movement toward a new, integrative framework. All three involve efforts to avoid conceptual orientations that have proved problematic in past research. The most fundamental of the three questions is: How do child and environment jointly contribute to cognitive development? The other two questions involve elaborations of this question: How do developing behaviors in different contexts and domains relate to each other? What methods are appropriate for analyzing cognitive development? In a general way the answers to these questions apply to development at any age, but the answers apply in particular ways to school-age children.

The Collaboration Of Child And Environment

The central unresolved issue in the study of cognitive development today seems to be the manner in which child and environment collaborate in development. As a result of the cognitive revolution, it is generally accepted that the child is an active organism striving to control his or her world. But this emphasis on the active child often seems to lead to a neglect of the environment. Contrary to the structural approaches of such theorists as Piaget (1975) and Chomsky (1965), it appears to be impossible to explain developing behavior without giving a central role to the specific contexts of the child's action, including those in the school environment (see Scribner and Cole, 1981; Flavell, 1982b).
Giving context a central role does not mean merely demonstrating once again that environmental factors affect assessments of developmental steps. Researchers have documented these effects in thousands of studies, thus pointing out the inadequacies of the Piagetian approach to explaining the unevenness of development. Surely Piaget, Kohlberg (1969, 1978), and other traditional structural theorists have failed to deal adequately with the environment. It is also true, however, that the functionalists have not produced a satisfactory alternative—an approach that both deals with the environment's roles in development and treats children as active contributors to their own development (Lerner and Busch-Rossnagel, 1981). An analysis of the collaboration of child and environment in development is just as unlikely to arise from a functionalist emphasis on the environment as from a structuralist emphasis on the child.