The Bioecological Theory of Human Development
t age six, Urie Bronfenbrenner moved with his family from Russia to New York where he eventually earned degrees in psychology and music. After serving as an
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Army psychologist during World War II, he became a member of the Cornell University faculty. There, he developed his ecological systems theory in which individuals were viewed as the center of ever-larger and more remote influences on their lives. Improving all these influences for the sake of children’s development was a key motivating factor in Bronfenbrenner’s life work, important in his earlier professional years as a contributor to the creation of Head Start and, in his last years to a final publication inspired by the events in New York city on September 11, 2001 (Lerner, 2005).
Figure 8.1 shows the basic ecological systems model as it graphically defines how each system nests within the next and how each one acts on children’s development. The microsystem at the center is “the setting within which the individual is behaving at a given moment in his or her life” (Lerner, 2005, p. xiii). For young children this will most often mean the family, home, center or school classroom, and possibly a religious setting. The mesosystem doesn’t exist on its own, but is “the set of Microsystems constituting the individual’s developmental niche within a given period of development” (p. xiii). The center or school, immediate community, television and other in-home media, and possibly health agencies would fit into the mesosystem. A more remote influence is the exosystem, which could include the parents’ workplace or caregivers’ own home lives as either of these influence the attitudes and behaviors of adults toward the children. Most remote is the macrosystem, which includes economic, cultural, political, and national influences, including public policies that bear on children’s lives.