ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author stress that although 'child' and 'development' may seem to be simple unproblematic concepts, they are not. She begins with showing some of the complexities and ambiguities of the several concepts that readers must not leave unquestioned. 'Stage' models of development are relevant to the concept of continuity and discontinuity in development. The history of childhood has received less attention than it deserves, and it suffers from a patchiness of facts. Children's lives are not so well recorded as men's. The relationship between what is believed about children, what is prescribed as appropriate child-rearing, and what is actually done is not clear in the historical record, or even today. One common research approach in child development is to compare different age groups of children and so derive a picture of how behaviour looks at a series of ages and how the age groups differ.
