DOROTHEA SHARP (1874-1955), Young Explorers (oil on canvas)

PRIVATE COLLECTION/MARK MURRAY FINE PAINTINGS, NEW YORK/THE BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY

n 1955, a group of child-development researchers began a unique study. Their goal, like that of many developmental researchers, was to find out how biological and environmental factors influence children’s intellectual, social, and emotional growth. What made their study unique was that they examined these diverse aspects of development for all 698 children born that year on the Hawaiian island of Kauai and continued studying the children’s development for more than 30 years.

With the parents’ consent, the research team, headed by Emmy Werner, collected many types of data about the children. To learn about possible complications during the prenatal period and birth, they examined physicians’ records. To learn about family interactions and the children’s behavior at home, they arranged for nurses and social workers to observe the families and to interview the children’s mothers when the children were 1 year old and again when they were 10 years old. The researchers also interviewed teachers about the children’s academic performance and classroom behavior during the elementary school years and examined police, family court, and social service records that involved the children, either as victims or perpetrators. Finally, the researchers administered standardized intelligence and personality tests to the participants when they were 10 and 18 years old and interviewed them at age 18 and again in their early 30s to find out how they saw their own development.

Results from this study illustrated some of the many ways in which biological and environmental factors combine to produce child development. For example, children who experienced prenatal or birth complications were more likely than others to develop physical handicaps, mental illness, and learning difficulties. But whether they developed such problems—and if so, to what degree—depended a great deal on their home environment. Parents’ income, education, and mental health, together with the quality of the relationship between the parents, especially influenced children’s development. By age 2, toddlers who had experienced severe prenatal or birth problems but who lived in harmonious middle-income families were nearly as advanced in language and motor skills as were children who had not experienced such problems. By the time the children were 10-year-olds, prenatal and birth problems were consistently related to psychological difficulties only if the children also grew up in poor rearing conditions.

What of children who faced both biological and environmental challenges—prenatal or birth complications and adverse family circumstances? The majority of these children developed serious learning or behavior problems by age 10. By age 18, most had acquired a police record, had experienced mental health problems, or had become an unmarried parent. However, one-third of such at-risk children showed impressive resilience, growing up into young adults who, in the words of Werner (1989, p. 108D), “loved well, worked well, and played well.”

Michael was one such resilient child. Born prematurely, with low birth weight, to teenage parents, he spent the first 3 weeks of his life in a hospital, separated from his mother. By his 8th birthday, Michael’s parents were divorced, his mother had deserted the family, and he and his three brothers and sisters were being raised by their father, with the help of their elderly grandparents. Yet by age 18, Michael was successful in school, had high self-esteem, was popular with his peers, and was a caring young man with a positive attitude toward life. The fact that there are many children like Michael—children who show great resilience in the face of adversity—is among the most heartening findings of research on child development. Learning about the Michaels of the world inspires child development researchers to conduct further investigations aimed at answering such questions as why individual children differ so much in their response to similar environments, and how to apply research findings to help more children overcome the challenges they face.

Reading this chapter will increase your understanding of these and other basic questions about child development. It also will introduce you to some historical perspectives on these fundamental questions and to the perspectives and methods that modern researchers use to address them. But first, we would like you to consider perhaps the most basic question of all: Why study child development?