Bronfenbrenner's Theory Of Child Development

Analysis of my development over the life course using Bronfenbrenner’s theory.
Hoo Kar Mun
B1600922
Department of Psychology
PSY113
James Yeoh
Najla Darwishah

Urie Bronfenbrenner left a memorable legacy with his theory on ecological systems on child development, marking a great leap in understanding how interrelated the environment and experiences of a child is. The many reasons I admire and chose Bronfenbrenner was because he managed to summarize the most complicated subjects such as childhood into something more malleable and understandable for people. Childhood has always been the most important stage in a person’s life as it the first building blocks of our personality. The theory explains how environmental factors affects

Urie Bronfenbrenner (1979) curiously puts it as “The ecological environment is conceived as a set of nested structures, each inside the nest, like a set of Russian dolls”. Personally after reading his paper, I would consider it as some sort of onion. The reason to being so is that the bulb contributes on how the plant grows and hence, metaphorically a child. The ecological theory consists of microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem, macrosystem and finally the chronosystem. However, Scott Shane (2010) may refute Bronfenbrenner’s ideology as he believes that genes play the major role in deciding an individual’s personality and traits. One of his reasons was the experiment between twins where even though they were raised apart, eventually were drawn to the same occupations. Scott Shane does raise a valuable point, however, I still believe that genes play the role on shaping our physical traits but not mentally. You see, if a child is kinesthetically talented, obviously the child would be drawn to activities such as dancing or drawing for it is egotistical and craves attention. However, it also takes nurturing to sow the interest on the child and experiences to allow it to venture in finding its

I have acknowledge that my family members and school played a major role in my childhood and one such interrelated relationship they had was the pressure from my parents to be normal. Don’t get me wrong but I loved learning so much, however school simply ruined it for me. The early hours of waking up to the horrible facilities that my school had were just some of the reasons that put me off from exploring my passion and love for learning new things. The fact that everything was just memory based and had no stable reason on why we were performing this constant repetition. It almost drove me crazy as a child. Back then my schedule consisted of waking up at 6am in the morning and coming back for homework and chores every day. My parents weren’t much in knowing much about my teachers but they did give strong rules in which school was my priority. However, as I previously mentioned, my parents were really religious and were mostly involved with church so they had contact with my acquaintance in church. Overall the relationship between my microsystems, especially involving my parents, had a negative impact for me. That’s why I try to keep my activities and relationships out of my parent’s