Provided by David Satcher, M.D., Ph.D.
Surgeon General of the United States of America
Chapter 3: Children and Mental Health
Theories of Development
Historically, the changes that take place in a child’s psyche
between birth and adulthood were largely ignored. Child development first became
a subject of serious inquiry at the beginning of this century but was mostly
viewed from the perspective of mental disorders and from the cultural mainstream
of Europe and white America. Some of the“grand theories” of child development,
such as that propounded by Sigmund Freud, grew out of this focus, and they
unquestionably drew attention to the importance of child development in laying
the foundation for adult mental health. Even those theories that resulted from
the observation of healthy children, such as Piaget’s theory of cognitive
development, paid little attention to the relationship between the development
of the“inner self” and the environment into which the individual was placed. In
contrast, the interaction of an individual with the environment was central to
the school of thought known as behaviorism.
Theories of normal development, introduced in Chapter 2, are presented briefly
below, because they form the basis of many current approaches to understanding
and treating mental illness and mental health problems in children and adults.
These theories have not achieved the broader objective of explaining how
children grow into healthy adults. More study and perhaps new theories will be
needed to improve our ability to guide healthy child-rearing with scientific
evidence.
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