ABSTRACT
I recently read a particularly incisive description of the goals of developmental psychology. It included the following description:
The eventual goal of developmental psychology is to provide a single theory that describes the whole of development. However, the approach most scientists actually follow is to separate the problem into two parts. First, there are the laws that tell us how the child changes with time. (If we know what the child is like at any one time, these laws tell us how it will look at any later time.) Second, there is the question of the initial state of the child. (pp. 10–11)
