It Takes an Entire Village to Raise a Child
Abstract
<p>The African proverb that serves as the title of this review captures the essence of Children and Families in the Social Environment and, not coincidentally, of a major theme in the contemporary study of children. Over the course of the past two decades, the study of human development has decidedly moved away from mechanistic and reductionistic biologic and psychogenic models. In their place there has been a stress on developmental contextual models (Lerner, 1991) emphasizing that changing relations between the developing individual and the changing settings of his or her ecologically valid context constitute the basic process of human development. James Garbarino, his mentor Urie Bronfenbrenner (1979), and scholars associated with the life span/life course view of human development (e.g., Baltes, 1987; Brim & Kagan, 1980; Elder, 1979; Featherman, 1983) have provided the seminal intellectual leadership for this change in the study of human behavior and development.</p> <p>The book under review exemplifies this paradigm shift: To understand the characteristics of individual development, children must be seen in relation to their family, and families must be seen in relation to their community. The community, in turn, is a setting shaped by the other levels of organization—biology, social institutions (including