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The publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) was probably the single most vital force in the establishment of child psychology as a scientific discipline.
The notion of the evolution of the species – and especially Darwin’s continued search for “sign of man in animal life” – inevitably led to speculation about the development of human beings and society.
Darwin classified the infant as an “animal,” a link in the evolutionary scale between other animals and mature human beings.
Animal behavior was regarded as primarily instinctive, inflexible, and stereotyped, while adult human behavior was trainable, flexible, and creative.
From the evolutionary point of view, the prolonged period of helplessness in human infancy - compared to the relatively sort period in animal infancy - is of great significance.
During this period, the infant is particularly easy to train, so that adults can teach the child the skills, information, and ideas necessary for survival in the physical and social world.
It followed from Darwin's theory that "man was to be understood by a study of his origins - in nature and in the child. When did consciousness dawn? What were the beginnings of morality? How could we know the world of the infant? Questions like these which, in form of more or less sophistication, were to dominate child psychology for many years..."
Systematic study of larger groups of children began toward the end of the nineteenth century.
One of the pioneers, G. Stanley Hall, president of Clark University and one of the founders of American psychology, attempted to investigate "the contents of children's minds" because, like Darwin, he was convinced that the study of development was crucial to the problem of understanding human beings.
To conduct his studies of larger groups, he devised and refined a new research technique, the questionnaire, a series of questions designed to obtain information about children's and adolescents' behavior, attitudes, and interests.
In a sense, Hall's work, which continued into the twentieth century, marks the beginning of systematic child study in the United States.
By modern standards, his work cannot be considered controlled or highly objection; the problems with which he was concerned have been investigated with much greater scientific sophistication in recent years.
Nevertheless, his use of large numbers of children and his attempts to determine the relationships among personality characteristics, adjustment problems, and background experiences represented distinct methodological advances over earlier philosophical and biographical approaches.
