School and Community In.uences on Human Development

In 1979, Bronfenbrenner published the first of a series of works charging developmental psychology with the need to study human development from more naturalistic and contextual points of view. He stressed that humans develop within a set of embedded physical and sociocultural contexts of influence beginning with their own biological make-up and ending with the political/historical contexts into which they are born and raised. Bronfenbrenner emphasized that we cannot understand human development without understanding the multidimensional forces that operate across time both within and across these levels of influence-biological, psychological, social, cultural, economic, and political. Although it is true that children are most directly influenced by their immediate relationships and face-to-face interactions with other human beings, particularly their parents, siblings, extended family members, friends, peers and teachers, these proximal human relationships are nonetheless shaped by more distal social, cultural, economic, and political forces in the contemporary societal context. For example, workplace experiences affect parents’ mental health and economic resources, which in turn affect parenting behaviors and child outcomes (e.g., Whitbeck et al., 1997). Similarly, neighborhoods structure the types of opportunities and risks children are exposed to whenever they leave their home, and thereby, to the extent their parents adapt their parenting behaviors to the neighborhood environment outside of the home, also affect parent-child interactions in the home (e.g., Furstenberg, Cook, Eccles, Elder, & Sameroff, 1999). Finally, schools are elaborate multilevel institutions that influence children’s academic, social-emotional and behavioral development in a wide variety of ways-ranging from teacher influences on student achievement associated with the quality of instruction, to physical influences on student mood and motivation associated with the school building itself in terms of noise, light, cleanliness, and overcrowding, to peer influences on students’ behavioral conduct based on the social composition of a school’s student body (e.g., Rutter & Maughan, 2002).