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Article: Child Psychology
- Article from:
- Encyclopedia of Children and Childhood in History and Society
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CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2004 The Gale Group Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Child Psychology
Although parents and students of human development have been observing children for millennia, researchers in America and Europe began to conduct systematic studies of childhood behavior around the turn of the twentieth century. Prior attempts to codify normal development had been published as diaries that described the behavior of a single child, usually the son or daughter of the author. In 1787, for example, German psychologist Dietrich Tiedemann documented the growth of a child's intellectual abilities; a century later, German psychologist William Preyer authored elaborate essays that described the development of both the embryo and the young child. In 1887, even ...