How is history important? In every way. I teach and do my research on various aspects of children's development, and understanding what has been going on historically (and is currently happening) among the group being studied is as important for me as is understanding that group's culture. That's not really surprising, given that culture and history are so related.
I think that, as a group, psychologists and human developmentalists have become used to taking into account cultural variation, whether thinking about culture at the level of society (as in some types of cross-cultural psychology, or cultural psychology) or at the level of within-society cultural groups (racial/ethnic groups or social-class groups).?But I don't know that we've paid adequate attention to the historical period in which we're collecting our data on any given group. And yet, as Elder's work looking at two cohorts who were born 8 years apart at around the time of the Great Depression in the U.S. shows really well, people's development was greatly different depending on which of the two birth cohorts they were born into.
How we go about raising children in times of economic and/or political stress is likely to be different, in important ways for their development, than what we do when the economy is booming and there are no political disasters in process.
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