ABSTRACT
Throughout this book, we have made reference to real-life applications of child development theory. For example, children’s behavioural, emotional and social problems have been approached from perspectives such as medical diagnosis, family systems and social information processing; theories such as those of Dewey, Piaget and Vygotsky have been applied educationally; and attachment and learning theories have been implicated in debates about the best way to raise children. Practice informed by theory is sometimes referred to as ‘praxis’. Equally, we have seen that policy decisions concerning children can fly in the face of what theory and research suggest will promote positive development, as in the case of Australian Aboriginal children removed from their attachment figures. Alternatively, practice that promotes positive development can occur in the absence of a theoretical basis, as in the case of the nineteenth-century South Australian infants who were fostered rather than institutionalized.
