Child, Family, and Community

Book excerpt: With its focus on the socialization of the child, this book helps readers understand how the child develops in a variety of contexts, including the family, community, and early childhood institutions. Child, Family, and Community gives readers the tools they need to work effectively with both children and parents in ways that support children to be healthy, secure, and socialized members of their families, and eventually society. Guidance strategies are presented, as well as child rearing strategies that parents, parent educators and other professionals and practitioners can put to immediate use. The author relates the many contexts in which the child exists–family, school, and community–to Bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory, which divide’s a person's environment into five different levels: the microsystem, the mesosystem, the exosystem, the macrosystem, and the chronosystem.