Urie Bronfenbrenner, born in Russia in 1917, was a psychologist and professor at Cornell University from 1948 until his death in 2005. Through his work as president of a national task force on early childhood (1966-1967), he came to appreciate the multiple influences on children’s school performance. In his 1979 book The Ecology of Human Development, Bronfenbrenner proposed that the culture at large plays a role in children’s development through the transmission of beliefs about how children should be raised and how families should function in society. He borrowed the concepts of “ecology” and “ecosystems” from the natural sciences.

Human ecology is the study of the complex interrelationships between humans and their social environments. Using his model of human ecology, Bronfenbrenner examined the effects of a variety of social and economic factors on children’s development.

Bronfenbrenner envisioned his model of human ecology as a “nested arrangement of concentric structures, each contained within the next” (1979). Each of the concentric structures represents a level of context in which development occurs (Figure 5-1). There are reciprocal interactions between the levels. Children influence their environments, and environments influence children’s development.