Chapter Three: Domains in Development
After completing Chapter Three students will be able to:
- Describe the two major themes of child development: nature vs. nurture and continuity vs. discontinuity
- Define the four domains of development
When studying development, there is a lot to learn! As you read in Chapter 1, Child Development can be approached in a number of ways: time, domains, theorists, themes, cultural perspectives, and appropriate practice. Chapter 2 helped you to understand the theoretical perspectives, and most of the other chapters in this textbook will tackle time, cultural perspectives, and appropriate practice. Here, we are going to take a closer look at the four domains of development, and how they are related to the themes of “nature versus nurture” and “continuity versus discontinuity.”
In Chapter 1, you read briefly about four domains of children’s development that we will discuss in this textbook: physical/biological, cognitive, social, and emotional. Before we start, it is important to recognize that other authors may separate development into more or less than four domains. For example, in other textbooks, you may see social and emotional development combined into a single domain; other sources identify as many as seven individual domains. In this textbook, you will read about four domains; we, the authors, chose these four because we feel they best represent the major areas that educators, psychologists, and researchers agree on. Plus, without too many distinctions between domains, we will be able to better explain how the domains are interconnected.
