Urie Bronfenbrenner's Ecological System Theory

Urie Bronfenbrenner was a developmental psychologist who was known for his work and theories on child development. He developed his theories and ideas with the use of ecological models, which are defined as, a method used for the further understanding of the influential interrelations between various personal and environmental factors. Bronfenbrenner’s belief was that the social environments in which children were raised impacted greatly on their development. The ecological environment is conceived as a set of nested structures each inside the other like a set of Russian dolls (Bronfenbrenner 1977 ; Lewin 1917,1935 ), It’s seen this way because it moves and expands through the inner most section called The Microsystem, to the outer most The

This example and analysis gives merit to the idea in the theory which states that we are not mere recipients of the experiences we have when socializing with people in our micro system environment, but we are contributing to the construction of said environment.

The second system in the ecological systems theory is The Mesosystem: This is defined as the system comprising of the links between two or more microsystems in a child’s life for example the classic relationship between the home microsystem and school’s microsystem

Bronfenbrenner strongly believed that a child’s development is likely to be successfully progressed by strong and supportive links been microsystems. For example it was deduced that a child’s ability to learn at school depends on the quality of teaching that is provided by their and also on the amount of value to which parents allot to scholastic activities and consult or interact with their child’s teachers (Gottfried,Fleming, & Gottfried, 1998; Luster & McAdoo, 1996; Schulting, Malone, & Dodge,