Jean-Pascal Assailly - Child Psychology: Developments in Knowledge and Theoretical Models

Dedicated to and in memory of Ren Zazzo, to whom I owe all my intellectual training as a researcher in child psychology...

And particularly the 1983 book, O en est la psychologie de lenfant, for continuing the cycle in the hereafter...

Health and Patients Set

coordinated by

Bruno Salgues

Volume 3

Jean-Pascal Assailly

First published 2022 in Great Britain and the United States by ISTE Ltd and John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

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ISTE Ltd 2022

The rights of Jean-Pascal Assailly to be identified as the author of this work have been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2021947915

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978-1-78630-423-0

Each child must be studied as a lock, unique in its mechanism; and then the special key must be devised to fit that lock, so that the door of opportunity may be pened, as wide as the constitution permits, for each child to develop their individual innate capabilities.

White House Conference, 1932

This book is the first in a two-part series:

1) In this book, we study the evolution of our knowledge in the field of child psychology over the last 40 years.

2) In a future work, we will analyze the impacts of this evolution on practices and policies in the field of childhood (schooling, health, safety, parenthood); for this, we will have to question the practitioners.

In 1983, my teacher, Ren Zazzo, published one of his last books, O en est la psychologie de l'enfant? and dedicated it to us (To my students at Nanterre, as a token of my gratitude). After 40 years, we are picking up the baton.

He particularly pointed out the drifts and aporias in the media conception of psychology (the psychology of philosophy professors is psychoanalysis, and what psychoanalysis!); he was disenchanted with the wording and what it covered. The situation has not improved much.

Psychology was for a long time taught in 12th-grade philosophy, tackling various themes such as perception and intelligence, then disappeared from the curriculum in 2003 and was reduced to a few texts by Freud and Lacan. It is amusing to see that National Education adopts the very reductionist view that psychology is the same as psychoanalysis, and vice versa.

However, in various countries (United States, Belgium, Switzerland), psychology is still taught in secondary schools.

When the Ministry of Education formed 40 working groups of professionals for curriculum reform, there was not a single psychologist.

In order to provide some balance to adolescents, during what is a risky time in their lives, importance should be placed on reintroducing knowledge of scientific psychology, on how emotions, relationships, self-knowledge, etc. work.

On bookstore shelves, the most noticeable evolution has been the shift from 90% scientific psychology/10% personal development in the 1970s to 90% personal development/10% scientific psychology today. This says much about the popular conception of psychology. Even in child psychology sections, there is still a lot of emphasis on personal development.

The divisions that Zazzo analyzed are still there:

• between practice and research;
• between child and genetic psychology;
• between the field and the laboratory;
• between the epistemic subject of Piaget and others and the individual in his totality (do we reduce the child to sectors or development indicators, as neuroscience does now, or preserve the psychology of the person?).

Very schematically, the question on which this book is structured (where are we now, 40 years later, and where are we going?) covers two main analyses:

• new developments in child psychology, covering phenomena that did not exist before in a significant way in the real lives of children (e.g. homoparentality, attacks, Covid-19);

• new developments in already long established objects of study (e.g. intelligence, the motherchild relationship), where significant theoretical evolutions have taken place.

  Table A.1. Historical evolution of the number of French subjects by age group

  (source: INSEE 2016)

  Less than 15 years old	1519 years old	2024 years old
  1991	11,808,904	4,353,479	4,392,026
  1992	11,846,294	4,186,630	4,399,883
  1993	11,841,637	4,050,716	4,427,167
  1994	11,809,628	3,934,183	4,428,102
  1995	11,756,031	3,894,364	4,362,366
  1996	11,676,351	3,949,740	4,242,118
  1997	11,601,547	4,024,370	4,084,939
  1998	11,532,939	4,067,056	3,956,287
  1999	11,521,697	4,073,140	3,848,339
  2000	11,558,446	4,068,194	3,809,829
  2001	11,613,651	4,037,408	3,867,157
  2002	11,645,716	4,033,889	3,945,290
  2003	11,669,451	4,040,407	3,996,557
  2004	11,680,487	4,103,486	4,014,148
  2005	11,696,788	4,152,069	4,037,139
  2006	11,715,950	4,171,803	4,044,928
  2007	11,778,201	4,146,595	4,029,070
  2008	11,827,212	4,121,673	4,003,665
  2009	11,917,951	4,059,357	4,030,922
  2010	11,998,951	4,011,584	4,030,881
  2011	12,060,943	3,977,327	4,014,582
  2012	12,123,714	3,923,399	3,985,089
  2013	12,186,689	3,909,392	3,955,259
  2014	12,221,427	3,944,210	3,877,125
  2014	12,318,645	3,966,973	3,890,578
  2015	12,349,774	4,009,445	3,819,678
  2016	12,320,073	4,075,385	3,765,556

With regard to historical developments, one question keeps coming up: are the trends in this or that behavior, situation, phenomenon, etc. decreasing, increasing or remaining stable?