This chapter begins with a brief discussion of tools one need to approach the multiple environments of childhood, including the measurement issues in child-environment interactions. These perspectives bring a deeper understanding and a greater coherence to an exposition of the environments of child development. The chapter reviews the important issue of what the child brings to his or her interactions with the several environments of development. The microsystem refers to the proximate level of environmental influences, in which variables in the immediate situation impact the child. Macrosystem characteristics of social class and cultural ideology shape children's development in profound ways. Although distal, macrosystem influences on child development are embedded in all of the proximal nested levels of the ecological systems model. It has been observed that perhaps the most influential factor in deciding the course of a person's development is the culture where the person is born.

The study of risk in individual development played an instrumental role in the origin of contemporary developmental psychopathology and the emergence of resilience studies. This chapter provides an overview of progress and ongoing issues encountered in the developmental study of risk and adversity. It addresses different approaches for examining effects of risk and adversity on development. The chapter first discusses risk factors and cumulative risk indices, emphasizing environmental and sociodemographic status variables. It then focuses on stressful life events and efforts to measure ongoing adversity exposure. The chapter also examines major issues in defining, measuring, and investigating developmental risk and adversity, while highlighting important new research directions. Better standardization of risk and adversity measures allow researchers to investigate how the effects of specific levels of risk and adversity and processes underlying those effects vary across different contexts and population.

This chapter describes the idea of maternal care within the theoretical tradition of psychoanalysis in which it was initially elaborated. It considers development in infancy and early childhood from the point of view of the infant growing toward independence within the context of maternal care. The chapter provides a portrait of the infant as an inherently social participant whose development promotes, and indeed requires, changing patterns of parental care to facilitate its progress. It considers research illustrating the nature of the relation between maternal care and development. To establish the significance of the environmental provision afforded by maternal care, it is necessary to make such empirical connections between mother-infant interactions and child outcomes. To some extent, the importance of maternal care can be observed within short time frames. This is most clearly demonstrated in the perturbation studies.

This chapter presents a discussion of novel assessment techniques that may strengthen the ability to identify the environmental risks for children accurately and thoroughly. Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) is ideally suited to provide rich data to improve our understanding of proximal environmental indices that effect child outcomes such as parent behavior, family dynamics, and social networks. The proximal determinants often interact with distal environmental factors such as the neighborhood environment. The chapter highlights novel approaches to assessing these distal environmental factors. Two recent techniques, systematic social observation (SSO) and geographic information systems (GIS) have been used to identify disorder in environments, as well as the spatial proximity of risky and protective environmental structures. A novel assessment technique that may add to the reliability of child and teen report of movement in the neighborhood are Global Positioning Satellite (GPS) devices.

The teacher-pupil relationship represents an important dyadic model, which focuses on information exchange and holds that the fundamental process through which information is disseminated is a dyadic one, defined as two people: a teacher and a learner. The teacher-pupil dyad model suffers from some of the same problems as are found in the mother-child dyad model. The focus on dyadic interactions enables the investigator to easily explore the direct consequences of the action of one member on the behavior of another. The history of the measurement of dyadic interactions should immediately alert one to the major problems they face when they measure the more complete effect of the social environment on the child. Investigations of the effects of birth order on caregiver-infant interaction have also considered extradyadic influences. The need to go beyond the dyad is clear if one can understand the infant and child's social and emotional development.

This chapter exemplifies mechanisms through which social agents appear to impact the genome by upregulating, downregulating, or transforming its structural capacities. Viewing human development by connecting genes and environments with the term 'and' rather than 'versus' begs the task of understanding how that 'and' works. The social genome is formed within the context of its transactions with multiple social agents, which are channeled through society, family, school, and relationships with peers. Collectively these social agents are referred to as culture. Cultural ways of living depend on the climate conditions in which a culture unfolds. One other dimension of culture that is of interest in this conversation is lifestyle. The concept of lifestyle typically includes multiple factors, both genetic and environmental. The chapter concludes by commenting on the emerging picture of how the coaction of the genome and environments results in the manifestation of complex human behaviors.

This chapter argues that the treatment of the environment as a separable entity from systems of interest is not consistent with a dynamic systems (DS) perspective. Instead, the environment is a macrolevel within a system's organization. The chapter presents the definition of the system and shows how that definition reflects the researcher's or theorist's choice of the level of analysis. Incorporating analyses real-time and developmental-time scales, even without adopting a systems view, is perhaps the most daunting endeavor of developmental research. The chapter describes one such methodology, the state space grid (SSG) technique, as it intuitively illustrates the relations between structural and temporal aspects of system dynamics. It reviews various SSG studies that reveal critical aspects of system dynamics and structure. Finally, the chapter discusses the implications of the DS approach for the study of environmental contexts.

This chapter discusses the research pertaining to six different types of risks, and addresses these risks in the context of Bronfenbrenner's Ecological Systems theory. It examines the following environmental risks directly related to the child: demographic characteristics; parenting practices, attitudes, and beliefs; and maternal mental health. The risks also include home environment, as well as aspects of the child's environment that connect the child to the broader community, such as neighborhood; and a broader exposure to risk through environmental toxins. A cumulative risk model of development posits that adverse developmental outcomes can be better predicted by combinations of risk factors than by single risk factors. The chapter considers three promising avenues for future risk research: the use of statistical methods such as recursive partitioning to examine nonlinear effects, resilience or the ability of children to thrive despite the presence of risks, and the role of gene-environment interaction in understanding risk.

This chapter focuses on existing perspectives to arrive at an integrated approach to understanding environment across time. It describes the structural components of the environment, and focuses on the core issue of conceptualizing environment across time. There is more opportunity to identify more varied components of the environmental structure, and to examine interactions among the different ecological components. When integrating the elements, the conceptual task is essentially to overlay the structure of time on the structure of environments, with particular emphasis on their human ecological importance. The chapter addresses issues of environments that varied with respect to time duration and degree of stability and change, and discusses the nonlinear time structures. Similar to the nonlinear time structures, there are numerous well-established transitions in developmental context. These differ from the prior set in that they are not repeating, but instead are generally one-time occurrences that occur regularly across most individuals.

This chapter presents a brief historical background to how the parenting environment has been understood and outlines some of the most recent knowledge that contemporary attachment theory and research has elucidated. The optimism in relation to the influence of relational environments gave way to a nihilistic attitude as findings from behavior genetic studies increasingly implicated genetic transmission and deemphasized the importance of gross measures of parenting environments. Twin and adoption studies repeatedly demonstrated that most individual difference attributes, including normal personality and various psychological disorders were best understood as genetically determined. The chapter describes the behavioral and cognitive aspects of parenting that appear to mediate the link between the parent's internal working model of attachment and that of the child. It also discusses features of the parenting environment that are relevant in the investigation of early attachment and development: parental psychopathology and the parental couple relationship.

This chapter advocates that developmental science is well positioned to engage in systematic investigation that creates taxonomy of family environments with the explicit goal of understanding how different types of family environments contribute to the lifelong development of individual children. Within a family, at least three levels of analysis are possible: analysis at the level of individuals, analysis at the level of social subunits, and analysis at the level of the group as a whole. Family behavior is expected to change over time and across situations, as a direct result of shifts in the family's goals, strategies and plans, resources, and individual experiences of its members relative to the six functional domains. Family success in a general way is determined by how well a family functions relative to achieving family goals. The family goals used in judging success may be identified either by family members or by external sources.

This chapter describes the disadvantages faced by children from poverty and the gap in outcomes between poor and non-poor children in all domains of development. It illustrates how the risks poor children are exposed to be often confounded and that their effects are cumulative. The chapter reviews the research evidence for direct effects of early care and education programs on the development of poor children, including a discussion of the mechanisms that transmit effects and interaction of program characteristics with child and family characteristics. It discusses two-generation programs and indirect effects on child outcomes via changes in the family and home environment. Given the importance of the home environment and the interaction among home and educational environments, many programs take a two-generational approach. Finally, the chapter describes several instruments used to measure the environments where early child care, education, and intervention occur.

This chapter discusses the many ways in which schools influence human development with multiple levels of regulatory processes most directly related to the day-to-day interactions children have with their teachers. It describes each of the major contextual levels outlined in 1999 and also discusses how their associated processes can influence children's academic and social-emotional functioning. The chapter summarizes what people know about developmental changes in these contextual processes as children progress through different school types and how such contextual changes influence children's development. The next level of school contextual processes is most closely associated with the teacher. This chapter discusses three examples of processes at this level: teacher beliefs, instructional practices, and teacher-student relationships. The next level of influences is that of academic tracks or curriculum differentiation policies. Parent involvement in their child's schooling has consistently emerged as an important factor in promoting both academic achievement and socio-emotional well-being.

This chapter explores sibling and peer relationships in light of contextual events, particularly those that include parents and caregivers. The literatures on sibling and peer relationships have included attention to the contributions of parental involvement, yet treatments in the two literatures have entailed somewhat distinctive types of approaches and implicit aims. The large body of work documenting the importance of peer relationships to children's mental health and social adjustment has stimulated considerable interest in the foundations of peer friendships. Toward the overarching goal of unraveling the complex social network, a number of studies have examined child development in triadic environments where third parties have sometimes been construed as exerting influences that are indirect. Notions about social competencies such as, sociability, empathy, and social understanding are likely to be advanced, if not reshaped dramatically, by augmenting attention to the child's social functioning in caregiver-child-child contexts.

This chapter assesses recent progress in the social sciences regarding the conceptualization and measurement of neighborhoods as environments of human development. It reviews the literature on archival-based assessments of neighborhoods (e.g., various measures of census-based units). The systematic social observation approach provides data regarding the current physical state of neighborhoods, which is only indirectly inferred from census data. The chapter compares and contrasts these measures with subjective respondent-based indices (e.g., interviews, questionnaires, ethnographies) as well as observer-based methods. It highlights the strengths and weaknesses of each type of data. This chapter reviews newer methods for assessing neighborhoods such as geographical information systems (GIS) and spatial mapping approaches and policy-based experimental studies of neighborhood relocation. It addresses a variety of remaining problems in the measurement of these contexts. Finally, the chapter presents the policy implications of recent work on measurement of neighborhoods.