Disrupting Developmentalism by Cultivating Wisdom
Chapter excerpt: The social sciences cannot avoid values. Historically, normative developmentalism valued progress that arranged children and races on ladders of linear progress toward Western civilization construction of adult (male) rationality. By contrast, contemporary lifespan developmental theory-that is, development that considers the entire span of human life, including adulthood and old age- values optimal adaptation to an ecological or cultural niche. Normative developmentalism greatly harms racialized and Indigenous children and families through its skewed values. But most people endorse lifespan development as optimal adaptive expertise. The point of this chapter is to disrupt normative developmentalism - understood as biologically essential linear progress toward greater rationality associated with biological recapitulation of the species through child development- without totally abandoning the idea of development as context-sensitive adaptive expertise.