Essays
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Childhood - Kramer, Karen L.
Childhood refers to the period of growth and development bracketed by weaning and puberty, roughly ages 3–10. During this important life history stage, the brain rapidly grows and achieves the majority of its adult size, the first permanent molars erupt, and the digestive tract matures. Socially, communication skills are rapidly acquired during childhood, gender identities are established, cooperative norms of behavior develop, and self‐reflection and emotional regulation mature. Cognitively, increasing independence exposes children to a high frequency of new experiences, perpetual learning, experimentation, and change. Childhood development has captured the attention of scholars from diverse disciplines. This review highlights foundational and new research in biological, social, cognitive, and economic aspects of child development. Attention is paid to how childhood is distinct compared to juvenility in other closely related species and the remarkable changes that have occurred during human evolution. This review focuses on childhood in traditional societies where children grow up under energetic, demographic, and social conditions that more closely reflect the selective pressures that shaped childhood. -
Diverse Family Forms and Children's Well‐Being - Powell, Brian
The relationship between family structure and children's well‐being has been the subject of an extensive body of family scholarship that continues to grow. Amidst the worldwide diversification of families, scholars have grappled with how to make sense of the emergence and proliferation of “alternative” family forms—those differing from the “traditional families,” or what has been referred to as the Standard North American Family. This essay explores the literature on several of these alternative family forms, focusing on including single‐parent, stepparent, and cohabiting families, older‐parent families, adoptive families, same‐sex families, and multiracial families. The authors next identify six key areas for social scientists to consider when assessing the implications of diversifying family structures for children. -
The Inherence Heuristic: Generating Everyday Explanations - Cimpian, Andrei
The ability to explain enables humans to understand their world and informs much of their behavior. And yet, little is known about the psychological processes by which explanations are generated. Here, I describe a recent proposal on this topic. According to this proposal, people come up with explanations much as they come up with solutions to other complex problems—heuristically. Extensive research on human reasoning has suggested that people answer difficult questions (e.g., how satisfied are you with your life?) by retrieving simple information that comes to mind easily (e.g., I am in a good mood right now) and then using this information to construct an approximate answer. Prompts for an explanation (e.g., why do we eat eggs for breakfast?) are hypothesized to trigger a similar process. This process oversamples highly accessible facts about the entities in the observation to be explained. Owing to the organization of memory, these accessible facts are more often about the inherent features of the relevant entities (e.g., eggs have a lot of protein) than about their history, their relations to other entities, and so on. This skew toward inherence then propagates through to the final product of this heuristic process, which is typically an inherence‐based explanatory intuition (hence the name inherence heuristic). The inherence heuristic proposal sheds light on the mechanistic underpinnings of explanation and has implications for our understanding of other cognitive phenomena of societal importance (such as the tendency to explain membership in social groups in terms of deep biological “essences”).