CHILD STUDY. A branch of study con cerned with the physical, mental and moral life of the child from birth through infancy and adolescence to adult age. It thus includes child psychology, dealing with the mental life of children, overlaps into genetic psychology (q.v.), and may just as properly be further subdivided into child physiology, child pathol ogy, child sociology, etc. Lately every phase of the Child-Welfare Movement has come to be grouped under the general name of child study. The field as a whole covers every phase of child-life, individual and collective, and involves everything known or knowable about the growth and development of human beings from birth to maturity. To treat of so comprehensive a subject in a single encyclopxdia article is obviously impossible. The reader will find some of its more important subdivisions treated elsewhere under their appropriate head ings, while this article will be confined to the narrower field of the physical and mental life of the child. Even of these two phases of the subject space permits but a mere outline of its aims and methods and a general statement of some of its principles and results.
scientific interest in children arose first in the classroom, it is but natural that the earliest students of child-life should have been educators. It is indeed with such educational reformers as Rousseau, Basedow, Comenius, Froebel and Pestalozzi that child study may be said to have originated. The in terest aroused by them in the child as a sepa rate entity proved so strong that the 19th cen tury saw the birth of a well-nigh universal child study movement. In Germany Preyer's,
Aims and Methods.—The necessity for a special study of childhood, especially for a child psychology, arises from a few essential structural and functional differences existing between the adult and the child. These differ
ences are not only physical, but physiological and psychological; and they include differ ences of kind as well as of degree. Besides the obvious anatomical differences in the child — such as shorter legs and a relatively longer trunk and larger head—and the less obvious physiological differences — such as a higher pulse rate, a relatively greater heart action and a correspondingly faster respiration there is a most marked difference in psycho logical processes. Some of these the human child seems to exercise even in infancy, while others come in weak form in later childhood; but a few are entirely wanting before maturity. For all these reasons, the old notion that the child is a miniature copy of man has long been eradicated by psychologists. But despite these reasons for making child study a separate branch of investigation, it cannot be considered as entirely unrelated to the other sciences deal ing with the life of man. If it is fallacious to study the child as if he were a little man; it is equally unscientific to do so without regard to his potential manhood.
Just as the child's mental processes differ in kind from those of the adult, so the methods of studying them must be modified or even changed altogether. For instance, the method of introspection (q.v.), the principal method of general psychology, is unavailable in child psychology, since the power of introspection does not appear much before adolescence. For want of direct introspection, the methods of observation and experimentation must be relied upon. The first, known as the adiary method,p consists in carefully recording a child's pro gressive development as actually noted by the observer, usually a parent. The great Pesta lozzi kept a diary of this kind in which the do ings and sayings of his son were minutely re corded. Another famous instance is Darwin's