From Neurons To Neighborhoods

“From Neurons to Neighborhoods”

Introduction

Parents have always been amazed by the fast growth and development in the earliest years of their children’s lives.

Setting the limits of science in early childhood development is not easy. Understanding of child development is set up on multiple sources of knowledge that include theoretical models, empirical research, program evaluation, and professional experience.

There are ten guiding principles or core concepts:

1. Human development is shaped by a dynamic and continuous interaction between biology and experience.

2. Culture influences every aspect of human development and is reflected in childrearing beliefs and practices designed to prove healthy adaptation.

3. The growth of self-regulation is a cornerstone of early childhood development that cuts across all domains of behavior.

4. Children are active participants in their own development, reflecting the intrinsic human drive to explore and master one’s environment.

5. Human relationships, and the effects of relationships on relationships, are the building of healthy development.

6. The broad range of individual differences among young children often makes it difficult to distinguish normal variations and maturational delays from transient disorders and persistent impairments.

7. The development of children unfolds along individual pathways whose trajectories are characterized by continuities and discontinuities, as well as by a series of significant transitions.

8. Human development is shaped by the ongoing interplay among sources of vulnerability and sources of resilience.

9. The timing of early experiences can matter, but, more often than not, the developing child remains vulnerable to risks and open to protective influences throughout the early years of life and into adulthood.

10. The course of development can be altered in early childhood by effective interventions that change the balance between risk and protection, thereby shifting the odds in favor of more adaptive outcomes.

Chapter 2. Rethinking Nature and Nurture

Since the moment of conception, hereditary potential reveals in harmony with the environment. Nature and nurture are partners in how developing people interact with the surrounding environment and in the transactions between the gene and the variety of internal environments that surround it within the body. They are sources of stability and malleability in human growth.

Behavioral geneticists seek to partition behavioral variability into its genetic and environmental components and describe their interaction by taking advantage of naturally occurring variation in genotypes and environments.

They have two research strategies: adoption research and twin research. Each of them provide methods of estimating quantitatively the proportion of variance in human characteristics that derives to heredity and to the environment, and of examining how these influences interact in development.

Researchers

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