Nature and Nurture in Early Child Development

For developmental scientists, the nature versus nurture debate has been settled for some time. Neither nature nor nurture alone provides the answer. It is nature and nurture in concert that shape developmental pathways and outcomes, from health to behavior to competence. This insight has moved far beyond the assertion that both nature and nurture matter, progressing into the fascinating terrain of how they interact over the course of development. In this volume, students, practitioners, policy analysts, and others with a serious interest in human development will learn what is transpiring in this new paradigm from the developmental scientists working at the cutting edge, from neural mechanisms to population studies, and from basic laboratory science to clinical and community interventions. Early childhood development is the critical focus of this volume, because many of the important nature-nurture interactions occur then, with significant influences on lifelong developmental trajectories.

Daniel P. Keating is Professor of Psychology, Psychiatry and Pediatrics, Research Professor at the Center for Human Growth and Development, and Faculty Associate in the Survey Research Center at the Institute for Social Research, all at the University of Michigan. He is also a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research (CIFAR), and a member of CIFAR's Successful Societies Program. Keating has held positions at the University of Minnesota, the University of Maryland, the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and Education in Berlin, Germany, and the University of Toronto. He has occasionally appeared on television, including on the Phil Donohue Show, the Vision series on TV Ontario, and others. He has also been a guest on radio talk shows featured on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), focused mainly on his book (with Clyde Hertzman) Developmental Health and the Wealth of Nations (1999). Currently, much of his work focuses on the just-launched National Children's Study, for which he serves as an investigator in a number of capacities.