ABSTRACT

Chapters in developmental psychology or child development textbooks can be organized in terms of “ages and stages” or topically in terms of physical, intellectual, social, and emotional development. Neither strategy is wholly satisfactory to any textbook writer, let alone to the readers. The ages and stages approach is necessarily redundant; the topical organization is necessarily repetitive in tracing topics developmentally. These problems are inevitable in a science where the knowledge base is woefully incomplete and where theories are chaotically supplemented with a variety of mini-theories designed to deal with particular phenomena, behavioral domains, or variables. In some ways the most exciting and productive recent sources of knowledge advancement are to be found in studies of particular variables and phenomena. In this summary chapter a number of the topics, variables, and phenomena of current interest are considered and related to the structural/behavioral model of development described in the previous chapter. They are socioeconomic status (SES), early experience, cognition and intelligence, affect and emotion, social and moral development, and life-span perspectives. These have been chosen from many that might be discussed because of their relatively high profile in the current literature and because they are the kinds of phenomena that must be accounted for in a model of behavioral development that strives to provide a structural/behavioral approach that is relatively encompassing of what will account for developmental outcomes.