Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Biological and Experiential Influences on Psychological Development
- 2 Neural Development and Lifelong Plasticity
- 3 Mother and Child: Preparing for a Life
- 4 Early Experience and Stress Regulation in Human Development
- 5 Biology and Context: Symphonic Causation and the Distribution of Childhood Morbidities
- 6 Understanding Within-Family Variability in Children's Responses to Environmental Stress
- 7 Origins, Development, and Prevention of Aggressive Behavior
- 8 Mental Health Intervention in Infancy and Early Childhood
- 9 Bringing a Population Health Perspective to Early Biodevelopment: An Emerging Approach
- 10 Society and Early Child Development: Developmental Health Disparities in the Nature-and-Nurture Paradigm
- Index
- References
5 - Biology and Context: Symphonic Causation and the Distribution of Childhood Morbidities
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 May 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Biological and Experiential Influences on Psychological Development
- 2 Neural Development and Lifelong Plasticity
- 3 Mother and Child: Preparing for a Life
- 4 Early Experience and Stress Regulation in Human Development
- 5 Biology and Context: Symphonic Causation and the Distribution of Childhood Morbidities
- 6 Understanding Within-Family Variability in Children's Responses to Environmental Stress
- 7 Origins, Development, and Prevention of Aggressive Behavior
- 8 Mental Health Intervention in Infancy and Early Childhood
- 9 Bringing a Population Health Perspective to Early Biodevelopment: An Emerging Approach
- 10 Society and Early Child Development: Developmental Health Disparities in the Nature-and-Nurture Paradigm
- Index
- References
Summary
INTRODUCTION
The Nature-Nurture Culture Wars
By and large, investigators and scholars contributing to the Millennium Dialogue on Early Child Development (described in more detail in the Acknowledgments at the beginning of this volume), including the author of this chapter, were academically reared within a scientific generation marked by a confluence of two irreconcilable views on the origins of human disorders. Within a single generation, physicians, clinical and developmental psychologists, social workers, and laboratory investigators were steeped in the twin, sequential agendas of environmental and biological determinism. In the former of these views, prominent in the scientific world of the 1960s and 1970s, disease and disorder were held to be products of contextual exposures and adversities. Human afflictions, it was believed, were due almost exclusively to the acute and chronic, cumulative influences of environmental agents of disease. Such agents included psychological stressors, impoverished living conditions, physical toxins, infectious pathogens, and insufficient or malevolent parenting. Prevention and treatment were taken to mandate alterations in these causative environmental exposures. Thus, schizophrenia was viewed as the product of psychological “double-binds” within dysfunctional family units, autism was regarded as the legacy of cold, distant mothers, and maternal overprotectiveness figured prominently in the presumed etiology of childhood anxiety disorders.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Nature and Nurture in Early Child Development , pp. 114 - 144Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010
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