Child Development Psychology: A Largely Unexplored Territory

Child development has spent most of psychology's history as an afterthought. For a long stretch, well into the early 1900s, people treated children as miniature adults. Nobody paid much attention to the stretch of years between being born and reaching adulthood, or to what actually happens during that time. Because the field is young, a lot of it remains open ground, which is part of what makes it such an interesting place to build a career.

Even with roughly a century of work behind it, the field has covered real distance. We now have a decent grasp of how parenting shapes a child, and of how kids form their own sense of right and wrong. We are figuring out, slowly, what helps a child grow into a steadier, more complete adult. That youth comes with a cost, though: plenty of disagreement, and major theories that nobody has managed to prove one way or the other.

When it comes to the psychoanalytic side of the subject, two names come up most often: Sigmund Freud and Erik Erikson. They disagreed on nearly everything, including what shapes a child's growth and what development even means. The conversation hardly stops with those two. Jean Piaget contributed his stages of cognitive development, Lev Vygotsky argued for the weight of social context, and Albert Bandura put forward social learning theory. For all of it, the question of what truly drives a person's growth from infant to adult is still wide open.

That open-endedness is exactly what makes the work appealing, at whatever level you want to enter it. Maybe you want to sit across from children as a counselor. Maybe you would rather run studies that test the big theories, confirm them, tear them down, or replace them with something of your own. Either way there is room to move, and there will be for years. The unanswered questions are not small ones. Do a child's earliest experiences carry the most weight, or do the things that happen later in childhood matter just as much? There is the old argument over nature and nurture: are we handed certain traits through what we inherit, or do we arrive as a blank slate and become whatever our surroundings make of us? And the question of continuity hangs over all of it. Does a child change gradually, bit by bit, or does everyone pass through a fixed set of stages on the way up? Nobody has settled any of this yet. Answering it is the job the field has left to do.