Nature Of The Child

by Jerome Kagan

Essays discuss child development, infant behavior, stages of growth, moral standards, emotions, the cognitive process, and the role of the family

Genres: Psychology, Education, Childrens

336 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1984

About the author

Jerome Kagan was an American psychologist, who was the Daniel and Amy Starch Research Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, as well as, co-faculty at the New England Complex Systems Institute. He was one of the key pioneers of developmental psychology.
Kagan has shown that an infant's "temperament" is quite stable over time, in that certain behaviors in infancy are predictive of certain other behavior patterns in adolescence. He did extensive work on temperament and gave insight on emotion.
In 2001, he was listed in the Review of General Psychology among the one hundred most eminent psychologists of the twentieth century. After being evaluated quantitatively and qualitatively, Kagan was twenty-second on the list, just above Carl Jung.

Reviews

[Steven Peterson · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the epilogue to his "The Nature of the Child," psychologist Jerome Kagan writes that ". . .the central theme hidden in and between the chapters of this book is that the person's interpretation of experience is simultaneously the most significant product of an encounter and the spur to the next." These interpretations can be manifest as schemas--a schema is ". . .a representation of experience that bears a relation to an original event" (categories, propositions, etc.). There are implications here for continuity and change in the understanding that people have of themselves and their worlds. Kagan contends that biology (e.g., the maturation of the central nervous system) and experience shape the development of children's psychological qualities and cognition. As children move into adolescence, experience becomes the dominant force.

The interaction between biology and experience, Kagan insists, militates against the likelihood that the child's schemata and personal characteristics (e.g., aggressiveness) will have any necessary relationship to that child's adolescent and adult views. Put simply, early and middle childhood beliefs do not predict the views that an adult will hold. Biology provides one important part of the explanation. Biologists find that as one stage of development is left behind, its underlying structures may simply disappear and, hence, not be a part of new structures (e.g., certain sensory cells simply cease existence with the metamorphosis of the tadpole). Just so with psychological development.

To illustrate, Kagan takes "separation anxiety" among one-year olds. Many psychologists treat this as a harbinger of probable later adult problems. In Kagan's view, this anxiety may be temporarily adaptive, but has no necessary future function or importance. In a survey of longitudinal studies, Kagan reports that ". . .long-term preservation [of various psychological entities:] is minimal until late childhood."

Admittedly, there does appear to be some continuity in psychological entities from late childhood (6 to 10 years of age), and, by itself, this would seem to be compatible with the primacy principle. Kagan explains the carryover in situational or structural--but not psychological--terms. That is, if the situations in which people find themselves remain reasonably constant as they move through the different stages of development, there is likely to be continuity. On the other hand, ". . .the evidence does imply that if the profiles created by early encounters are not supported by future and current environments, change is likely."

Available data are supportive of Kagan's analysis. One of the most dramatic instances of this concerns individuals' personalities, normally assumed to be resistant to alteration. Moss and Susman survey a series of longitudinal studies of personality development and, in line with Kagan's argument, find that "Consistency is most obvious for personality characteristics that are endowed with positive cultural and societal valences." Supporting situations account better for stability than some unchanging internal mechanism standing alone.

All in all, a well written and important book that raises questions about the extent to which one stage on our lives affects subsequent stages. Well worth looking at.