Society and Early Child Development: Developmental Health Disparities in the Nature-and-Nurture Paradigm

doi:10.1017/CBO9780511975394.011

10 - Society and Early Child Development: Developmental Health Disparities in the Nature-and-Nurture Paradigm

Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 May 2011

Daniel P. Keating

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Daniel P. Keating

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Daniel P. Keating: Affiliation:
University of Michigan
Daniel P. Keating: Affiliation:
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

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Summary

The long-standing nature versus nurture debate has generated many controversies and was in turn fueled by them. The question of whether differences among individuals should be attributed to their genes or their environment, their inheritance or their circumstances, has been – and remains – central to how policy makers and the public alike think about major issues concerning social arrangements. It has become so fundamental to public discourse that it is hard to see beyond this legacy and grasp the full implications of the emerging nature-and-nurture paradigm captured in the preceding chapters of this volume. On the evidence presented in this volume, and continuing to accumulate rapidly in research centers around the world as developmental scientists use new tools and technologies to explore the new paradigm, the impact of this shift in thinking will be profound.

The greatest impact may well be in an area that has always been among the most controversial in the long nature-nurture standoff: What accounts for individual differences in competence and health? There is overwhelming evidence that individual differences in the full range of developmental outcomes – cognitive, behavioral, and social competence, along with physical and mental health, an aggregate for which we have used the term “developmental health” (Keating & Hertzman, 1999) – are not random but rather patterned by socioeconomic circumstances (Keating, 2009b).

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Information: Nature and Nurture in Early Child Development , pp. 245 - 292

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511975394.011 [Opens in a new window]

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Print publication year: 2010

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