ABSTRACT
When teachers and caregivers think about the children in their care, they tend to think of them as whole people. They look at how they play and relate that to their cognitive abilities. They think about family stresses and understand why a child might be sad or angry or aggressive when interacting with peers. They understand that a child who is exuberantly rowdy on the playground might be focused in the classroom. When developmental scientists study children, however, they tend to study different aspects of their development in isolation. They may talk about language development without discussing who the child is speaking to, even though they know that children speak differently when talking to parents or friends. They talk about the development of autonomy, ignoring differences between cultures with quite different cultural expectations, such as Germany and Japan. Like many other sciences, developmental psychology has traditionally sought to understand developmental process by studying different components in controlled, isolated conditions.
