I read a lot of textbooks on parenting for my Master’s in Psychology (Child Development), I’ve read tens of thousands of peer-reviewed papers on the topic, and part of the reason it’s hard work is that you can’t ever take things at face value.
In her now classic book Deconstructing Developmental Psychology, Dr. Erica Burman explodes a number of our ideas about child development by calling our attention to what’s really going on in an interaction, rather than what we think is going on.
For example, there’s a classic study where researchers put a baby on a solid surface which changed to glass, which had a design underneath implying that there was a ‘cliff edge’ that the baby would fall off if it went onto the glass. Researchers designed the experiment to find out what babies could understand about depth perception, but perhaps what they were actually testing was the extent to which the mother’s encouragement or lack of encouragement (and it was always the mother) could entice the baby across the ‘gap.’
These kinds of confounds exist throughout the research base, and because we’re not taught to look below the surface it can be easy to accept the results at face value. Dr. Burman specializes in looking below the surface so we can examine: what are we really trying to understand here? And in doing this, are we reinforcing the same old ideas about ‘success’ that aren’t really serving us now, never mind our children in the future?
Dr. Erica Burman’s Book:
Deconstructing Developmental Psychology 3rd Edition
Developments: Child, Image, Nation (Affiliate links).
Jump to highlights:
(01:12) The contribution of Professor Erica Burman to psychology.
(03:05) First studies about Childhood Development.
(04:26) How general philosophical questions are linked in child studies.
(07:42) Childhood as a distinct social category.
(09:10) The Concept of Human Interiority and Childhood.
(10:17) Our hopes, fears, and fantasies about childhood reflect our ideas about our lost selves.
(13:23) How the study of child development shifted when behaviorism came into play.
(16:28) We assume psychology is connected with child development.
(18:27) Importance of Democratic Parenting in our society.
(19:57) Developmental researchers oppressed working mothers and middle-class mothers.
(22:23) Impacts of authoritarian regimes in our parenting.
(27:19) Using visual cliff as an experiment in understanding depth perception in children.
(29:06) A child is functioning within a dynamic system of people and objects and everything around it.
(31:02) Mother’s appear as the sort of a presumed natural environment to children.
(33:11) Nuclear family performs ideological functions for Capitalism.
(37:00) Whether or not spanking should be banned.
(38:09) The ways environments inhibit certain behaviors.
(39:19) How welfare policies have affected families.
(42:27) Discussing the important discourses in parenting’s social and political issues in the book DDP.
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Emma 00:04
Hi, I’m Emma, and I’m listening from the UK we all want our children to lead fulfilled lives. But we’re surrounded by conflicting information and clickbait headlines that leave us wondering what to do as parents. The Your Parenting Mojo podcast is still scientific research on parenting and child development into tools parents can actually use everyday in their real lives with their real children. If you’d like to be notified when new episodes are released, and get a free infographic on the 13 reasons your child isn’t listening to you and what to do about each one, just head on over to YourParentingmojo.com/subscribe, and pretty soon you’re going to get tired of hearing my voice read this intro so come and record one yourself at YourParentingmojo.com/recordtheintro
Jen Lumanlan 00:45
Hello, and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today we’re going to take a dive into a topic that cuts across many of the ideas that we discuss here on the podcast. We’re going to take a critical look at the topic of Developmental Psychology as a whole and what we can learn about it when we raise our eyes up off the specific topics like theory of mind, and language development, and attachment that we often spend a lot of time delving into and consider the topics that these sit within. My guest for the conversation is Professor Erica Berman. Professor Berman is Professor of Education at the University of Manchester, an Associate Fellow of the British Psychological Society and the United Kingdom Council of Psychotherapists, and a registered Group Analyst. She trained as a developmental psychologist and is well known as a critical developmental psychologist specializing in innovative and activist qualitative research. Her research is focused on critical development and educational psychology, feminist and postcolonial theory, childhood studies on critical mental health practice, particularly around gender and cultural issues. Much of her work addresses the connections between emotions, mental health, and individual and social change. She’s a past chair of the Psychology of Women’s section of the British Psychological Society. And in 2016, she was awarded an Honorary Lifetime Fellowship at the British Psychological Society in recognition of her contribution to psychology. She’s associate editor of the Sage Encyclopedia of Childhood and Childhood Studies and the author of a number of books, most significantly, Deconstructing Developmental Psychology. And since it seems as though friends of the book have the right to call it DDP, we’re going to go ahead and do that here too. DDP is now in its third edition, and was honored with a special edition of the journal feminism and psychology discussing the impact of the book on the 20th anniversary of the publication of the first edition of the book, which really critiques mainstream theories and research methods to help us understand whether research on child development tells us more about the child, the researchers or the social environment that both of these exists within. So whether you’re expecting a child or you’re a new parent, perhaps you’re newer to my work, or whether you already have a child who’s getting on in years, and you’ve been a listener for a while, you’re going to find something new in this conversation that helps you step outside these usual topics and ask well, how did we get here? And where are we going? And even is this where we want to go? Welcome Professor Berman. It’s such an honor to have you here.
Erica Burman 02:55
Thank you for inviting me.
Jen Lumanlan 02:57
So maybe we can start with a little topic at the beginning of all of this the study of child development. How do we start studying children? How did all this come about?
Erica Burman 03:05
Well, yes, it’s not a small question. And I guess there are different ways of telling that story of how child development came about. The conventional story that you will read about in child development textbooks usually talks about the emergence of the Child Study movement. In fact, many men of a certain kind of class background started to take an interest in their own children, studying them in some detail. So the first studies about children and childhood are of a sort of semi-formal kind, observational studies by the fathers, not the mothers, otherwise occupied and not intellectual enough to engage in this esteemed new area of study. So their diary studies, and indeed, that methodological approach, remain a very important one for the study of early childhood in general, especially very early childhood and language development, and so on. So the child study movement, in a sense, is both the beginning of the study of psychology and also psychiatry. And in a way, slight child psychology and psychiatry really were elaborated alongside each other, almost indistinguishable. The questions that were motivating those first studies and inquiries, it’s fair to say, I think we’re not really specifically about children. It was an interest in the study of the child as a way to explore much more general philosophical questions. Questions about nature and nurture themselves are sort of laid on to older questions about original sin or free will, etc. And we continue to live with those big philosophical questions that people tend to look to the study of childhood to solve, and I have to admit that, in a way, that’s what kind of...
