HEAD START

Microsystem

The small, immediate environment that a child lives in and includes immediate relationships or organizations they interact with.

Example: Immediate family, caregivers, school, and daycare

How It All Started

1964

Bronfenbrenner testified about an anti-poverty bill.

“Urie’s work went well beyond increasing our knowledge of human development. Beginning with our joint work in creating Head Start, for 40 years, Urie and I stood shoulder to shoulder in arguing that our entire knowledge base be used in improving the lives of children and their families.”

-Edward Zigler

“.....interpersonal relationships, even [at] the smallest level of the parent-child relationship, did not exist in a social vacuum but were embedded in the larger social structures of community, society, economics and politics."

-Melvin L. Kohn

Who is Urie Bronfenbrenner?

• He was born in Moscow on April 29, 1917

• Bronfebrenner's father worked as a neuropathologist at a hospital for the developmentally disabled

• Received his Bachelor of Psychology and Music from Cornell

• Earned his masters in education from Harvard

• Has a doctorate in developmental psychology from the University of Michigan in 1942

• Focused on his research about child development and impact of social forces at Cornell

What is Head Start?

• United States Department of Health and Human Services

• Offers early childhood education, health, nutrition, and parent involvement services

Bronfenbrenner's Views on Development

• Environmental intervention methods such as family support services, home visits, and education for parenthood

• Saw human development is influenced through the environment

• Dissatisfied with the approaches to the study of human development

• "Much of contemporary developmental psychology is the science of the strange behavior of children in strange situations with strange adults for the briefest possible periods of time"

Counterarguments

ecological systems theory -> bioecological model

Mesosystem

Relationship between microsystems

Example: If a child is neglected by parents, it prevents them from forming positive relationships with teachers

HEAD START

Exosystem

Macrosystem

Settings or events that influence the child's socialization even if the child has no direct role in it. It has an indirect impact, can trickle down through other people's lives but not necessarily a small one

Example: Parents' divorce

Remote set of people and things to a child but still holding great influence over the child's development

Examples:

The government, cultural values, developing and industrialized countries, socioeconomic status, poverty, and ethnicity.

Bioecological Model

End.

Chronosystem

Environmental events, transitions over the life course, and sociohistorical circumstances.

Examples:

Hurricanes, divorce, death of a family member, an economic depression

Urie Bronfenbrenner

a presentation on

Anneke Yao & Kelly Tang