The Ecology of Human Development

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1. 01

   A child does not grow inside a relationship but inside concentric circles of systems — family, school, the parent's workplace, public policy — and the strongest effects often come from circles the child never sets foot in.

   The Ecology of Human Development · 1979

   The strongest effects often come from circles the child never sets foot in.

   Bronfenbrenner named the layers. The microsystem is what touches the child directly: family, classroom, friends. The mesosystem is the relation between them — whether school and home say the same thing or contradict each other. The exosystem is what affects the child without containing them: the parent's working hours, unemployment, leave policy. The macrosystem is culture: what a society believes a child is and what is owed to them. The chronosystem is time: what changes across a life and across history. The example that clarifies everything is the exosystem. A parent whose flexible hours are withdrawn comes home with less patience; the child was never at the meeting where it was decided, but the effect reaches them in full. Hence Bronfenbrenner's public policy conclusion, which underpinned the American Head Start programme: if you want to change children at scale, change the circles, do not merely advise the parents. And the sentence he is most quoted for says the other half: at the individual level, one constant, unreasonably devoted adult is, empirically, the best protective factor known.

   “Every child needs at least one adult who is irrationally crazy about him or her.”

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