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  1. Home
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  3. The Cambridge Handbook of Environment in Human Development
  • Cited by 18
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
October 2012
Print publication year:
2012
Online ISBN:
9781139016827
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139016827
Collections:
Cambridge Handbooks of Linguistics, Cambridge Handbooks of Psychology
Series:
Cambridge Handbooks in Psychology
Subjects:
Developmental Psychology, Psychology, Psychology: General Interest, Health and Clinical Psychology
Information

Book description

Families, communities and societies influence children's learning and development in many ways. This is the first handbook devoted to the understanding of the nature of environments in child development. Utilizing Urie Bronfenbrenner's idea of embedded environments, this volume looks at environments from the immediate environment of the family (including fathers, siblings, grandparents and day-care personnel) to the larger environment including schools, neighborhoods, geographic regions, countries and cultures. Understanding these embedded environments and the ways in which they interact is necessary to understand development.

Reviews

'This book will be a force for good.'

John Goodier Source: Reference Reviews

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Contents

Page 2 of 2

Contents
  • Chapter 22 - Early Exposure to Trauma
    pp 466-479
  • Domestic and Community Violence
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter explains the daily life in urban and rural communities. There is a long tradition of social theory suggesting that urban life may be detrimental to the quality and quantity of social relationships, and there is evidence that people living in urban areas are less likely to extend help to strangers. Adults living in rural areas tend to have different health beliefs and practices compared to adults living in urban and suburban areas. Children from farm families had greater academic success than children from nonfarm families living in rural areas. The differences were owing to strong parental involvement and high levels of integration into the local community. There is a substantial literature showing that socioeconomic and demographic factors affect the adaptive functioning of all family members and determines how parents parent. The chapter concludes with some general thoughts about the implications of urban-rural differences as regards behavior and development.
  • Chapter 23 - Child Maltreatment
    pp 480-497
  • A Pathogenic Relational Environment across Development
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter describes a set of new directions in the understanding of how poverty and poverty-related individual and environmental risks influence children and families. It presents the definitions of poverty and of the environment, and discusses new and emerging multidiscipline research on the links between poverty and child and family outcomes with an emphasis on mechanisms. The chapter summarizes the current state of the evidence emerging from the basic sciences (e.g., neuroscience), psychology, sociology, and economics. It outlines the innovations in prevention and intervention efforts both to change poverty itself and to interrupt the links between poverty and poor child and family outcomes. Some of the most innovative poverty reduction or alleviation interventions are place- or setting-based, seeking to infuse entire communities or settings with resources meant to reduce the prevalence or impact of one or more poverty-related risks.
  • Chapter 24 - The Cultural Organization of Children’s Environments
    pp 498-516
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter reviews existing theory and associated research on the development of social networks, and provides an overview of conceptual and methodological issues in the study of social network development. Issues common to research on network development include problems of definition, informant selection, reliability and validity, and setting network boundaries. It also includes the relevance of specific network characteristics, assessing network functions and providers, the effects of personal and contextual factors, the role of cognition, specification of change processes, and articulating network research with other research on the development of social relationships. The chapter presents a brief glimpse of unique trends and emerging work on social networks. This includes work on social network closure, observational studies, specialized populations, cyberspace networks, and interventions. Studies of specialized populations are potentially useful, as they may lead to an understanding of social network development under nonnormative conditions.
  • Chapter 25 - Children and Electronic Media
    pp 517-532
  • View abstract

    Summary

    The health and quality of the marital relationship are important aspects of the family to consider as environments for child development. Associations between the quality of the marital relationship and child development outcomes have long been demonstrated. This chapter presents the definition of marital health, and focuses on explicating the components of marital health, including distinctions between destructive and constructive interparental conflict from the children's perspective. It reviews the findings concerning pathways of the effects of marital health on children, including influences following from exposure to marital functioning (i.e., direct effects), and changes in family functioning, illustrated by parenting, linked with qualities of marital functioning (i.e., indirect effects). The chapter examines additional interrelated family contexts associated with marital health, including parental psychological adjustment, and divorced and divided families as well as blended families. Finally, it presents future directions for understanding marital health as a developmental context for child development.
  • Chapter 26 - Parenting Behavior as the Environment Where Children Grow
    pp 535-567
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter highlights research pertaining to children of illicit drug users or substance users. It provides an in-depth examination of how proximal and distal environmental factors for children of illicit drug users are conceptualized and measured, as well as how the understanding and methodology can be improved. The maternal-child interaction is typically assessed using coded live observations or videotaped footage. A lack of parental response to family conflict also tends to be problematic in substance-using families and maladaptive family problem-solving and avoidance of familial conflict has been associated with reinforcement of substance use behavior. Typically conflict, communication, and cohesion are assessed together using self-report measures of the overall family environment, either from the child or parent's perspective. Evidence indicates that a myriad of environmental risk and protective factors across parenting behaviors, family environment, social context, and the neighborhood play a role in determining outcomes for children of illicit drug users.
  • Chapter 27 - HOME Inventory
    pp 568-589
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter examines the impact of violence and trauma on young children's development through an environmental lens, beginning with the child's internal psychophysiological environment. It considers the ways in which children's physiologies are regulated by the relationships that guide their growth and dysregulated by trauma. The chapter demonstrates that parallel processes occur in the child's caregiving environment as caregivers and family are regulated and strengthened by social and cultural environments that nurture them and dysregulated when those environments are neglectful and dangerous. It shows that parents' own response to violence in their environments changes the way they think about and behave toward their children, shaping their children's development in ways that can persist into the next generation. Efforts to help children must target not only child behaviors and symptoms but the caregiving environments that sustain children and shape the trajectories of their development.
  • Chapter 28 - Measurement and Model Building in Studying the Influence of Socioeconomic Status on Child Development
    pp 590-606
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter summarizes rates of maltreatment and discusses key theoretical models on the etiology of maltreatment. It proposes a model by which parent and child development may interact over time to increase risk for a maltreating environment. A maltreating environment is a complex system that is multiply determined. Two complementary theoretical models have contributed substantially to the field's understanding of the causes of maltreatment: Belsky's social-contextual process model and Cicchetti and colleagues' ecological-transactional model. The chapter reviews the literature that examines perpetrators' ages when they are most likely to commit abuse and neglect, and some of the reasons why developmental periods in parents' lives and their risk for psychopathology might be associated with risk for maltreatment. Finally, the chapter covers possible ways in which a maltreating environment is influenced by child characteristics over development, with a focus on child antisocial behavior.
  • Chapter 29 - Assessment of Parental Psychopathology and Adaptive Functioning
    pp 607-625
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter offers an overview of theories and methods related to understanding the culturally structured environment of the child, with particular attention to integrative approaches. The concept of culture has been a continuing focus of discussion within the field of anthropology since its earliest days. The anthropological study of childhood gained new importance in the culture and personality school of thought that reached its zenith in the 1950s and 1960s. The concept of culture is a relatively new focus of interest in psychology. In contrast to the core consensus among anthropologists about what culture is and how it can be studied, psychological theories about culture tend to involve more distinctive constructs that may not overlap in either history or measurement. The developmental niche is a theoretical framework for the integration of concepts and findings from multiple disciplines concerned with the development of children in cultural context.
  • Chapter 30 - Assessment of Social Support, Social Network, and Social Capital
    pp 626-654
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter explores the pervasive media environments that increasingly provide a context for development. It focuses on media access, exposure, and effects on developmental outcomes. The kinds of media available to children and youth are changing rapidly during the digital age. The point of entry for understanding the influence of this media environment on developmental outcomes is an assessment of the media available in children's homes. Children who grow up in the United States live in an environment saturated with electronic media. Uses and gratification theory, grounded in the field of communications, provides an important framework for understanding media use patterns by children as well as by adolescents and adults. When the kind of media exposure is examined, a positive picture of media exposure emerges for certain content. The challenge of the 21st century is for societies to accentuate the positive opportunities afforded by media while minimizing the negative ones.
  • Chapter 32 - Mixed Model Analyses for Repeated-Measures Data
    pp 682-698
  • View abstract

    Summary

    This chapter describes one global parent-child relationship, the coding interactive behavior (CIB), as a window to the study of parenting behavior from infancy to adolescence. It presents the formulation of the language for an observational system of parent-child interactions, and discusses the theoretical and methodological requirements of the CIB. The chapter reviews the results of studies conducted with the system in different ages, pathological conditions, and cultural backgrounds. Associations between specific relational behaviors and specific components of the model, parent and child's physiology, representations, and social relationships, are presented to provide support for the proposed model. Longitudinal studies attesting to the stability of the parent and child's relational behavior and its prediction to stable components of the child's personality, adaptive behavior, and competence are presented using follow-up studies from infancy to adolescen.

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