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Conclusions
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- Theme 1: Nature and Nurture: All Interactions, All the Time
- Nature and Nurture Begin Interacting Before Birth
- Infants’ Nature Elicits Nurture
- Timing Matters
- Nature Does Not Reveal Itself All at Once
- Everything Influences Everything
- Theme 2: Children Play Active Roles in Their Own Development
- Self-Initiated Activity
- Active Interpretation of Experience
- Self-Regulation
- Eliciting Reactions from Other People
- Theme 3: Development Is Both Continuous and Discontinuous
- Continuity/Discontinuity of Individual Differences
- Continuity/Discontinuity of Overall Development: The Question of Stages
- Theme 4: Mechanisms of Developmental Change
- Biological Change Mechanisms
- Behavioral Change Mechanisms
- Cognitive Change Mechanisms
- Change Mechanisms Work Together
- Theme 5: The Sociocultural Context Shapes Development
- Growing Up in Societies with Different Practices and Values
- Growing Up in Different Times and Places
- Growing Up in Different Circumstances Within a Society
- Theme 6: Individual Differences
- Breadth of Individual Differences at a Given Time
- Stability Over Time
- Predicting Future Individual Differences on Other Dimensions
- Determinants of Individual Differences
- Theme 7: Child-Development Research Can Improve Children’s Lives
- Implications for Parenting
- Implications for Education
- Implications for Helping Children at Risk
- Improving Social Policy
638
Themes
Nature and Nurture
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The Active Child
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Continuity/Discontinuity
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Mechanisms of Change
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The Sociocultural Context
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Individual Differences
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Research and Children’s Welfare
n the preceding 15 chapters, you were presented with a great deal of information about how children develop. You learned about the development of perception, attachment, conceptual understanding, language, intelligence, emotional regulation, peer relations, aggression, morality, gender, and a host of other vital human characteristics. Although these are all important parts of child development, the sheer amount of information may seem daunting: getting lost in the trees and losing a sense of the forest is a real danger. We therefore devote this final chapter to providing an overview of the forest by organizing many of the specifics that you have learned into an integrative framework. A likely side benefit of reading this chapter is that you will probably discover that you understand much more about child development than you realized.
The integrative framework that organizes this chapter consists of the seven themes that were introduced in Chapter 1 and highlighted throughout the book. As we have noted, most child-development research is ultimately aimed at understanding fundamental issues related to these themes. This is true regardless of the type of development that the research addresses and regardless of whether the research focuses on fetuses, infants, toddlers, preschoolers, school-age children, or adolescents. Beneath the myriad details, the seven themes emerge again and again.