Abstract

Research on "family" was not a main topic in developmental psychology, though there are some efforts to consider the parental influence on child development. For example, psychoanalytic tradition empaphasized the importance of early expericences with caregivers or early mechanistic tradition favored unidirectional causal model considering only a part of the family relationships. These traditional approaches to family issues have underestimated the dynamic aspects of continuous interactions among family members and the functioning of the family as a totality which is related to the other social context. This paper investigated (1), why we have neglected the family issues in psychology while reviewing some major tradition of the developmental psychology, (2) what we can learn from the studies of family issues based on developmental contextualism, suggesting the directions and the analytic strategies of the further research, and (3) what kind of implicaitions and issues we can find on "woman" or "gender differences" in this process. Some empirical studies on divorce were presented to show how we have to deal with the family, as a main developmental context, and gender differences for explaining the current functioning of the individual and the changes over time.