Studies in Child Development Author:Arnold Lucius Gesell STUDIES IN CHILD DEVELOPMENT To The Staff of the Yale Clinic of Child Development CONTENTS Preface and Acknowledgments iv, ix Introductory 1. The Miracle of Growth 3 2. A Visual Chapter 13 PART ONE Methods of Approach 3. Charles Darwin and the Study of Child Development 35 4. A Biological Psychology 45 5. The Method of Co-Twin Control 58 6. The ... more »Conditioned Reflex and the Psychiatry of Infancy 65 7-The Documentation of Infant Behavior in Relation to Cultural Anthropology 82 8. Cinemanalysis A Behavior Research Technique 96 9. One-Way-Vision 103 PART TWO Patterns of Growth 10. The Predictiveness of Infant Behavior 109 11. Some Observations of Developmental Stability 117 12. Early Evidences of Individuality 127 13. Genius, Giftedness and Growth 137 vii Preface This volume is a collection of papers, prepared mostly on invitation for special occasions. The titles of the chapters, therefore, suggest a rather startling variety of subjects. But in reality these chapters all deal with a single unifying theme, namely, the characteristics and conditions of child development. In America, the study of child development has had a double motiva tion a scientific interest in growth as a biological process subject to natural laws and a humanitarian interest in the physical and psycho logical needs of the growing child in home, school, and community. There is no necessary conflict between these two areas of interest. Human development cannot be divorced from the cultural setting in which it occurs. The Yale Clinic of Child Development has functioned both as a research clinic and as a service clinic associated with a School of Medi cine, A devoted, co-operative staff have made it possible to maintain a reciprocal balance between so-called basic research and applied research. Our systematic investigation has been concerned with charting the normal ontogenesis of behavior at thirty-four progressive age levels from birth to ten years. Since development is in itself an integrating process and an integrative concept, it has been possible to study defects and deviations of maldevelopment by the same methods employed in the observation of normal behavior. In the course of years the Clinic has come into contact with an extraordinary variety of developmental manifestations in the preschool child attending the Guidance Nursery in the developmental supervision and survey of feeding behavior of well babies in the study of visual functions of infants and school chil dren in the preadoption examination of foster children and especially ix Introductory CHAPTER I 59 The Miracle of Growth 3 The task of science is to make the world we live in more intelligible. This world is filled with knowable realities. At one extreme is the Atom at another extreme is the Child. In the Miracle of Growth these two extremes meet. There are two kinds of nuclei the nucleus of the physical atom and the nucleus of the living cell. Each contains energies derived from the cosmos through ageless processes of evolution. An atom can be pictured as a tiny solar system, composed of a central nucleus surrounded by electrons. In comparison, the fertilized human egg cell is transcendently complex, for its organic nucleus initiates the most miraculous chain reaction known to science a cycle of growth in which a minute globule of protoplasm becomes an embryo, the embryo a fetus, the fetus an infant, the infant a child, the child a youth, the youth an adult, and the adult a parent. With parenthood, another cycle of growth is liberated. And so it comes to pass that children, mothers, fathers, preparents, and grand parents can all behold the miracles of growth. The exhibit which has been prepared with such imagination for your great museum is impressive, because it portrays the pageant of child development in full perspective...« less