Parenting and children's temperament are important influences on language development. However, temperament may reflect prior parenting, and parenting effects may reflect genes common to parents and children. In 561 U.S. adoptees (57% male) and their birth and rearing parents (70% and 92% White, 13% and 4% African American, and 7% and 2% Latinx,…

Despite the importance of self-control for well-being and adjustment, its development from early childhood to early adolescence has been relatively understudied. We addressed the development of mother-reported self-control in what is likely the largest and longest longitudinal twin study of the topic to this day (N = 1889 individual children with…

Socialization is the process of learning to be a human being that is born with the potential to be human. In this process, the person learns the basic values and norms of the society in which he lives, as well as the skills necessary to sustain his life. This learning takes place through parents, siblings, relatives, neighbors, peers, teachers,…

In this article, we engage with a question that has occupied the professional, policy, and popular discourse on education and socialization: are a child's development potential and outcomes contingent on innate abilities ("nature") or environment ("nurture") (Plomin, DeFries, & Fulker, 1988; Stiles, 2011; Tabery, 2014;…

Mental health researchers emphasize the importance of practitioner understanding of biology-environment interplay. Accordingly, our goal of the study described in this article was to understand students' preconceptions and misconceptions about biological and environmental influences on development through investigating their conceptions of…

This article intends to re-examine Rousseau's educational theory in the context of the nature/culture opposition. In contemporary discussions on the nature/culture dualism, it has been often stated that his educational theory is based on the assumption that a child is a natural being. However, the author demonstrates that Rousseau was instead…

The author, a psychology instructor at an American university, describes the internationalization of his course in Human Growth and Development. The author argues that human development cannot be easily summarized by nature (i.e., biological and evolutionary predisposition) or nurture (i.e., learning through environment and experience).…

New advances in neurobiology are revealing that brain development and the learning it enables are directly dependent on social-emotional experience. Growing bodies of research reveal the importance of socially triggered epigenetic contributions to brain development and brain network configuration, with implications for social-emotional…

Background: The development of Bronfenbrenner's bio-social-ecological systems model of human development parallels advances made to the theory of resilience that progressively moved from a more individual (micro) focus on traits to a multisystemic understanding of person-environment reciprocal processes. Methods: This review uses…

Recent research in the areas of neuroscience, neuroendocrinology, and genetics is reviewed providing convincing evidence for why and how the effects of bullying can last a lifetime. Specifically, the research reviewed herein indicates that (a) the brain experiences peer victimization in a similar way to physical pain, (b) peer victimization is…

Socially disruptive behavior during peer interactions in early childhood is detrimental to children's social, emotional, and academic development. Few studies have investigated the developmental underpinnings of children's socially disruptive behavior using genetically sensitive research designs that allow examination of parent-on-child and…

Since the time of the Greeks, philosophers and scientists have wondered about the origins of structure and function. Plato proposed that the origins of structure and function lie in the organism's nature whereas Aristotle proposed that they lie in its nurture. This nature-nurture dichotomy and the emphasis on the origins question has had a…

For more than half a century, child development has endured as one of the main components of teacher education. But if children do develop, as developmentalists claim, what precisely is it that develops and how? Traditionally, within education, answers to these questions have drawn heavily on the theories of Jean Piaget and Lev Vygotsky. Piaget…

In this article, the author describes his granddaughter Elly (Elysia), who is just over a year old. While he deeply enjoys her company as a granddaughter--after all, her favorite activity is to pull his graying beard--as an instructor of child psychology, both for early childhood and psychology students, the author is fascinated with observing…

The classical twin study provides a useful resource for testing hypotheses about how the family environment influences children's development, including how genes can influence sensitivity to environmental effects. However, existing statistical models do not account for the possibility that children can inherit exposure to family environments…