158: Deconstructing Developmental Psychology with Dr. Erica Burman

I read a lot of textbooks on parenting for my Master’s in Psychology (Child Development), I’ve read tens of thousands of peer-reviewed papers on the topic, and part of the reason it’s hard work is that you can’t ever take things at face value.

In her now classic book Deconstructing Developmental Psychology, Dr. Erica Burman explodes a number of our ideas about child development by calling our attention to what’s really going on in an interaction, rather than what we think is going on.

For example, there’s a classic study where researchers put a baby on a solid surface which changed to glass, which had a design underneath implying that there was a ‘cliff edge’ that the baby would fall off if it went onto the glass. Researchers designed the experiment to find out what babies could understand about depth perception, but perhaps what they were actually testing was the extent to which the mother’s encouragement or lack of encouragement (and it was always the mother) could entice the baby across the ‘gap.’

These kinds of confounds exist throughout the research base, and because we’re not taught to look below the surface it can be easy to accept the results at face value. Dr. Burman specializes in looking below the surface so we can examine: what are we really trying to understand here? And in doing this, are we reinforcing the same old ideas about ‘success’ that aren’t really serving us now, never mind our children in the future?

Dr. Erica Burman’s Book:

Deconstructing Developmental Psychology 3rd Edition

Developments: Child, Image, Nation  (Affiliate links).

Jump to highlights:

(01:12) The contribution of Professor Erica Burman to psychology.

(03:05) First studies about Childhood Development.

(04:26) How general philosophical questions are linked in child studies.

(07:42) Childhood as a distinct social category.

(09:10) The Concept of Human Interiority and Childhood.

(10:17) Our hopes, fears, and fantasies about childhood reflect our ideas about our lost selves.

(13:23) How the study of child development shifted when behaviorism came into play.

(16:28) We assume psychology is connected with child development.

(18:27) Importance of Democratic Parenting in our society.

(19:57) Developmental researchers oppressed working mothers and middle-class mothers.

(22:23) Impacts of authoritarian regimes in our parenting.

(27:19) Using visual cliff as an experiment in understanding depth perception in children.

(29:06) A child is functioning within a dynamic system of people and objects and everything around it.

(31:02) Mother’s appear as...