Bronfenbrenner's ecological systems theory

What it says

The theory is a map of everything that shapes a developing person, drawn as rings. The innermost ring holds the settings the child is actually in: home, school, the friends on the street. Each ring out holds something further from the child that still reaches them, out to the culture and the historical moment.

What matters is not only each ring but the links between them. A child does better when home and school talk to each other. A parent's long hours at work reach a child who never sees the workplace. Bronfenbrenner's complaint was that research had been studying children in laboratories and missing nearly all of this. He called it the science of the strange behavior of children in strange situations with strange adults.

He kept revising it. By the 1990s the person was back at the center, with their own temperament and activity. The engine of development became what he called proximal processes. Those are the everyday back and forth between a child and the people, objects and symbols around them, repeated over long stretches of time.

The five systems

From the child outward, with what each ring holds.

1. Microsystem

   The settings the child is in directly: family, classroom, a sports team, a close friend. The relationships here run both ways, and the child shapes them too.

2. Mesosystem

   The links between those settings. Whether a parent knows the teacher, and whether what happens at home follows the child to school.

3. Exosystem

   Settings the child is not in that still reach them: a parent's workplace, the school board, the local news.

4. Macrosystem

   The culture, the economy, the laws and the shared beliefs that the other rings sit inside.

5. Chronosystem

   Time, added in 1986: changes in the child and in the settings over a life, and the historical moment the whole thing happens in.

Where it came from

Bronfenbrenner was born in Moscow in 1917, grew up in New York and spent his career at Cornell University. In 1965 he was one of the planners of Head Start, the federal preschool program, which put much of the theory to work before it was written down.

The theory was set out in a 1977 paper in American Psychologist and in full in the 1979 book The Ecology of Human Development. The chronosystem came in a 1986 paper. In 1994, with Stephen Ceci, he recast the whole as a bioecological model. The last statement of it, with Pamela Morris, appeared in 2006, the year after he died.

What holds up, and what does not

The frame has held up as a way of organizing research, and some of its claims have been tested on their own. The link between home and school, the mesosystem, predicts how children get on at school. The outer rings reach children who never see them. Raj Chetty and colleagues reported in 2016 on families that moved to a better neighborhood. The children who moved young earned more as adults than those who moved later or not at all.

The criticisms are about testability and use. The model names everything and so predicts little on its own: a finding can nearly always be filed under one of the rings. And the theory most people cite is not the one he ended with. Jonathan Tudge and colleagues read the papers that used it in 2009. Most relied on the early rings and left out the proximal processes that the later version put at the center.

What it does not mean

It does not say that a child is the product of their surroundings, or that a hard setting fixes an outcome. The arrows run both ways in every ring, and the later version puts the child's own activity at the center. It does not rank the rings either. A warm home does not cancel a bad school, and a good school does not stand in for a home. The theory is a map of what to look at, not a verdict on anyone.

Check yourself

Three questions on what is above. Each answer says why.

1. A parent's long hours at a workplace the child never visits reach the child all the same. Which system is that?

   1. The microsystem
   2. The exosystem
   3. The macrosystem
   Show the answer

   Answer: B. The exosystem is a setting the child is not in that still reaches them. The microsystem is where the child actually is, and the macrosystem is the culture around all of it.

2. Pick the statement that describes the mesosystem.

   1. The links between the settings a child is in, such as home and school
   2. The culture and laws that surround every other ring
   3. The change in a child and their settings over time
   Show the answer

   Answer: A. The mesosystem is the set of connections between the settings the child is in. The other two options describe the macrosystem and the chronosystem.

3. What did Tudge and colleagues find in 2009 about how the theory is used?

   1. Most papers used the early rings and left out the proximal processes of the later version
   2. Most papers tested all five systems at once
   3. The theory had stopped being cited by then
   Show the answer

   Answer: A. The version most people cite is the 1979 one. Bronfenbrenner's later model made the everyday back and forth between a child and their surroundings the engine, and most of the papers never mentioned it.

Sources

1. Bronfenbrenner, U. (1979). The Ecology of Human Development: Experiments by Nature and Design. Harvard University Press.
2. Bronfenbrenner, U. (1986). Ecology of the family as a context for human development: Research perspectives. Developmental Psychology, 22(6).
3. Bronfenbrenner, U., and Ceci, S. J. (1994). Nature-nurture reconceptualized in developmental perspective: A bioecological model. Psychological Review, 101(4).
4. Bronfenbrenner, U., and Morris, P. A. (2006). The bioecological model of human development. In Handbook of Child Psychology, Volume 1. Wiley.
5. Tudge, J. R. H., Mokrova, I., Hatfield, B. E., and Karnik, R. B. (2009). Uses and misuses of Bronfenbrenner's bioecological theory of human development. Journal of Family Theory and Review, 1(4).
6. Chetty, R., Hendren, N., and Katz, L. F. (2016). The effects of exposure to better neighborhoods on children: New evidence from the Moving to Opportunity experiment. American Economic Review, 106(4).

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