Conceiving the environment from a developmental perspective

This chapter has two interrelated aims: first, it aims to widen Heft's important contribution to “a concept of the environment from a psychological perspective”; second, it aims to investigate the potentials of “child-environment variability” for developmental paths. For the first aim, we address Heft's 1988 paper “Affordances of children's environments: A functional approach to environmental description.” For the second (interrelated) aim, we examine what it means for a child to live an everyday life with a physical disability, in comparison with a child who lives with no physical disability.