Chapter 3.Normal Child and Adolescent Development

Theories of development, either explicit or implicit, are ubiquitous in scientific approaches to the human subject. Such theories have their own developmental process, because they reflect the contemporaneous zeitgeist and theoretical trends shared by neighboring disciplines. In the past half-century, dynamic systems theory has fully saturated a wide range of scientific disciplines and has come to inform the approach to change processes, from genetic expression to earth sciences. Most developmental theories of the present day eschew positivist and linear thinking and embrace the idea of change based on the activity and dynamic interface of multiple systems, both within the individual and within the environment. As the level of inquiry moves from the molecular to cognitive development, personality development within families, or broad social outcomes (such as the appearance of new developmental challenges in the digital age), developmental processes are understood to arise from the nonlinear, transactional, and self-organizing interactions of component systems at multiple levels. An important fundamental premise of such an approach for human development is that each individual’s evolution reflects a range of interacting systems embedded in a nested, hierarchical series of contexts that constitute each individual’s social-ecological environment (Ungar et al. 2013). Such a layered and dynamic conceptualization makes self-evident that a search for singular causality is almost always misleading, because complexity operates at every level of organization when studying living organisms, especially people. Thus, despite their vastly different levels of analysis and value hierarchy, most contemporary disciplines view causality as a (mostly) indeterminate, interactive process as an intrinsic feature of change, and transformation as inevitable.