This chapter of the handbook proposes a developmental ethics, an organic moral theory grounded in (1) humanity’s deep evolutionary history, (2) the malleability of the child’s neurobiological structures that undergird moral functioning, and (3) the influence of cultural practices on neurobiological development. The chapter addresses the following questions: What kind of creature are we? What qualities do we need to live a full life? What kinds of capacities make each a proper member of the species? What influences our development? Answers center around perhaps the most critical influence on human development, our species’ evolved nest. In humanity’s ancestral context, nestedness is a lifelong experience with particular import in early life. Moral virtue emerges from holistically coordinated physiological, psychological, spiritual systems oriented toward holistic communal harmony, social attunement, receptivity, and interpersonal flexibility. Understanding how the evolved nest scaffolds biopsychosocial and moral development reveals why antisocial behavior is so pervasive in modern Western culture – and it provides a baseline for redesigning society to promote prosociality.

The way networks grow and change over time is called network evolution. Numerous off-the-shelf algorithms have been developed to study network evolution. These can give us insight into the way systems grow and change over time. However, what off-the-shelf algorithms often lack are knowledge of the behavioral details surrounding a specific problem. Here we will develop a simple case that we will revisit over the next few chapters: How do children learn words from exposure to a sea of language? One possibility is that the words children learn first influence the words they learn next. Another possibility is that the structure of language itself facilitates the learning of some words over others. Indeed, we know that adults speak differently to children in ways that facilitate language learning, with semantically informative words tending to appear more often around words that children learn earliest. This invites the question: To what extent does the semantic structure of language predict word learning? This chapter will provide a general framework for building and competing models against one another with a specific application to the network evolution of child vocabularies.

This chapter begins by distinguishing among prevention, intervention, and promotion efforts, giving particular attention to how these processes operate in the context of schools. One example of a school-based, evidence-based practice – City Connects – is used to illustrate how prevention, promotion, and intervention can be operationalized in the contexts of schools and their local communities. As a clinical/public health model, City Connects is responsive to every child in the school, without an exclusive focus on either the subset of students who are in severe crisis or those who are highest performing. The authors argue that prevention-in-action requires working across polarities, such as intervening at both the individual and group levels, targeting challenges while fostering strengths and interests, and promoting healthy development while simultaneously intervening in existing difficulties. The chapter concludes with a summary of challenges and possibilities in implementing high-quality prevention and promotion approaches, such as developing a theory of change based on developmental science that includes measurable outcomes.

This chapter introduces my research questions, framework, and main findings. It begins with two striking vignettes to engage the readers and outline the significance of the two basic questions that motivate this book and intersect at children's social cognition: How do humans learn morality? How do we make sense of fieldnotes? The chapter situates the book in intellectual history, including the Wolfs’ original research, its connections to the Six Cultures Study, and its legacies. It then presents a new framework of cognitive anthropology distinctive from the behaviorist paradigm that motivated the original research. I situate the book in three broad streams of discussions: (1) theoretical conversations between anthropology and psychology on morality; (2) cross-cultural research on childhood learning; (3) studies of Chinese kinship, families, and childhood. I explain why it is important to study children to understand morality, human relatedness, and cultural transmission. I also make the case for reanalyzing historical fieldnotes. I then lay out a methodology that incorporates computational approaches into ethnography, summarize my main arguments, and outline the book structure.

In this chapter, we reflect on how different disciplines have conceptualised ‘early life’ with particular insights from evolutionary, social, and medical anthropology to challenge and further expand the narrow framing of a Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (DOHaD) focus and to show the scope of a biosocial perspective. First, we introduce how childhood and early life have been studied in anthropology, followed by a discussion on how early life has been conceptualised in public health, lifecourse, and development research. We then discuss how concepts of early life may impact caregiving practice and childhood environments, which in turn impacts research on early life itself, with longitudinal birth cohort studies as an example. We highlight the need for critical and reflective thinking about the ways in which we do biosocial research, and the impact it has on our understanding of the DOHaD. We suggest that a reflexively engaged biosocial anthropological dialogue around research on early life broadens the scope of cross-disciplinary work, engages with the complex and dynamic process of childhood development, and contributes to a more nuanced framework of early life for DOHaD-informed research and health practice.

This chapter describes the principles of the lifecourse perspective and its potential for examining the origins of health and disease (DOHaD). DOHaD research, framed by a lifecourse perspective, accounts for how experiences ’get under the skin’ by influencing biological functions during developmental windows of opportunity, transforming lifecourse trajectories, and affecting intergenerational health patterns. We go on to investigate how exposures and experiences influence different individuals in different ways, with some more vulnerable or susceptible to risk than others, resulting in significant variability in developmental outcomes. Yet, even when taking differential susceptibility into account, there are cross-cutting themes in research focusing on a wide range of disease outcomes in adulthood. These include socio-economic disadvantage and early adverse experiences, which result in a generalised susceptibility to risk. We conclude with a discussion on the limitations of current work in this field, and future directions and priorities for research, including more integrated, multidisciplinary approaches and longitudinal research designs, as well as more sophisticated statistical methods of analysis that move beyond correlational methods and simple causal models.

Emotions and emotion regulation constitute essential constituents of parenting. This chapter assesses central features of parenting through the lens of emotions and emotion regulation. Substantive topics include relations between emotions and emotion regulation in parenting, principles of parenting and emotion regulation, parenting direct and indirect effects in emotion regulation, determinants of emotion regulation in parents (and children), and supports for parent and child emotion regulation.

The introductory chapter provides a general overview of the five pivotal topics of the science of the cultural mind. The first topic is that of mediated learning. Human learning is rarely direct; it is often mediated by other human beings, by symbolic tools, and by socioculturally constructed activities. The second topic focuses on mediation provided by symbolic tools. These tools are specific for different cultures and subcultures and impact the development of cognitive and learning abilities. The third topic concerns the so-called leading activities. It is argued that child development can be viewed as a sequence of periods each of which is associated with a different socioculturally constructed predominant activity. The fourth topic is on learning potential. While the typical intelligence or achievement tests evaluate what children can do at a given moment, the learning potential tests help us to understand what children will be capable of doing tomorrow if the appropriate help is given to them. The last topic is cognitive education. For future-oriented education, it is essential to include the development of thinking skills in the regular school curriculum.