A Period of Institutionalization and Fragmentation (1915–1940) 209approach to development, which suggested that development
unfolds in a series of steps, fixed and predetermined in order.
Only under extreme conditions, such as famine, war, or
poverty, are children thrown off this biologically programmed
timetable. According to Gesell, the tendency to grow is the
strongest force in life, and the inevitableness and surety of
maturation are the most impressive characteristics of early
development. “The inborn tendency toward optimum devel-
opment is so inveterate that [the child] benefits liberally from
what is good in our practice, and suffers less than he logi-
cally should from our unenlightenment” (Gesell, 1928,
p. 360). Gesell’s years of careful observation produced a
corpus of work that was not only a highly sophisticated
account of motor development but an early version of a dy-
namic systems view of development (Thelen, 1993).
At the same time, Jean Piaget (1896–1980) was emerging
as an influential theorist in Europe and offered a further con-
trast with prevailing American views. Piaget offered not
only a rich description of children’s cognitive progress from
infancy to adolescence but the first fully developed theory
of stages of cognitive development. In a series of books,
Piaget outlined four major stages of cognitive development,
the stages of sensorimotor development (0 to 2 years), pre-
operational development (2 to 6 years), concrete operations
(6 to 12 years), and formal operations. Children were ob-
served to pass through these stages in a fixed and sequential
order as they moved toward increasingly abstract modes of
thought. His theory and empirical demonstrations over the
span of more than half a century place him with Freud in
the forefront of child development theorists of the twentieth
century. Although there have been challenges to his origi-
nality with credible claims that much of his theory was an-
ticipated by Baldwin (Cahan, 1984), his uncanny ability to
design tasks to test his theoretical propositions secured his
scientific reputation.
An Appraisal of the Era
The marked differences among the three theorists in this pe-
riod, Watson, Gesell, and Piaget, are brought into perspective
by noting their positions on key developmental questions.
Their basic positions concerning what causes development
were in stark contrast. Watson was the archetypical mecha-
nistic theorist who believed that development occurred from
the outside in. He believed that the goal of theory was not to
understand behavior but to predict and control it. He viewed
learning and conditioning principles as the processes through
which these ends were met. In contrast, Gesell was a theorist
who was organismic in his viewpoint on the causes of devel-
opment, championing maturational processes as the key to
development. His goal was to provide a systematic account
of development, not necessarily to control or predict the
direction of development. Piaget balanced the importance of
both internal, biological processes of development and exter-
nal resources to support it. He posited biological adaptational
processes as the explanatory mechanism for development,
and his theoretical aim was understanding, not prediction or
control. Although these three theorists diverged in their as-
sessment of the nature of developmental processes, they did
agree that there are universal and historically independent
processes that account for development.
The three theorists also differed in their assumptions about
the course of development. Piaget was clearly a committed
stage theorist who endorsed the concept of discontinuity
across development. Watson, on the other hand, viewed de-
velopment as continuous. Gesell recognized both continuity
and discontinuity across development. For Gesell, there are
periods of reorganization at different points across develop-
ment but considerable continuity in terms of underlying
processes. Siegler and Crowley’s (1992) microgenetic ap-
proach might well have been championed by Gesell, with its
recognition that there is an uneven progression across devel-
opment as new skills and strategies are acquired and inte-
grated in the child’s repertoire.
The big-three theorists of this era also took somewhat dif-
ferent approaches to conducting research. Watson performed
laboratory “experiments,” which actually, because of their
lack of control, are more accurately referred to as demonstra-
tions. Gesell and Piaget, in contrast, raised systematic obser-
vation to a new level. Piaget watched, with much profit, his
own infants (Piaget, 1926), while Gesell made a career of cat-
aloging motor movements of other people’s children (Gesell,
1928). Both incorporated subtle structured interventions into
their observations—a pile of three red blocks, a matchbox, a
screen—to probe with infinite patience the minute changes in
abilities evident over the course of a week or a month in a
child’s life.
A final way in which the triad of theorists differed was in
their view of how—or whether—the principles of develop-
mental psychology should be applied to “real world” issues.
Piaget was basically uninterested in applied issues—in spite
of an abundance of efforts by others to apply his theory to
education settings in the 1960s and 1970s. He called these
concerns “the American question.” In contrast, Watson was a
strong proponent of applying learning principles to the rearing
of children. Through a series of popular books addressed to
parents, Watson tried to shape the thinking of a generation of
parents. “Parents, whether they know it or not,” he stated with
authority, “start intensive training of their children at birth. By
3 years of age, the child’s whole emotional life plan has been