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| Type | Private |
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| Established | 1966 |
| Endowment | $50 million (2020) [1] |
| President | Mariana Souto-Manning |
Academic staff | 26 |
Administrative staff | 51 |
| Postgraduates | 300 |
| Location | , , |
| Campus | Urban |
| Locations | 1 campus, online |
| Website | www |
Erikson Institute is a graduate school in child development in downtown Chicago, Illinois. It is named for the noted psychoanalyst and developmental psychologist, Erik Erikson.
The Institute was founded in 1966 by four child advocates: child psychologist Maria Piers; educator and activist Barbara Taylor Bowman; social worker Lorraine Wallach; and businessman and philanthropist Irving B. Harris. [2]
The Institute was established to provide training for people working in the recently created Head Start program. Its original mission was to provide early childhood teachers and caregivers with a comprehensive education in child development and a clear understanding of the role of family and culture in a child’s life. The mission has expanded to the education of anyone who works with or on behalf of young children. [2]
The Institute’s academic programs, applied research, and community work focus on children from birth through age eight, particularly those at risk for academic failure.
Erikson is led by its fifth president, Mariana Souto-Manning, PhD, who assumed the role on September 1, 2021. [3] She succeeded Geoffrey Nagle, who ended his term as president and CEO in February of that year. Previous presidents include Samuel J. Meisels, who left Erikson to become founding executive director of the University of Nebraska's Buffett Early Childhood Institute. [4]
Erikson Institute is accredited by the Higher Learning Commission and a member of the North Central Association.
Forty full- and part-time faculty teach approximately 260 masters, 12 doctoral, and 60 certificate students enrolled in the institute’s academic programs:
Master of Science degree programs offer opportunities for specialization in areas that include administration, infancy, bilingual/ESL, and child life.
Courses are offered in four categories: early intervention, teaching and learning, supervision and leadership, and infant studies.
Current applied research projects focus on after-school programs, assessment in early childhood classrooms, caregivers of substance-exposed infants, early literacy instruction with culturally and linguistically diverse children, Early Head Start, Early Reading First, infant mental health, social-emotional evaluation of children in foster care, early mathematics education, and vocabulary acquisition among ESL preschoolers.
Established in 2005, the center conducts policy research on early childhood issues in the Great Lakes region, including infant mental health and social emotional support services, services and support for immigrant children and their families, and prekindergarten early education initiatives.
Opened in January 2019, the Center offers assessment and treatment services for children from birth to age eight "inflicted by gun violence, poverty, and other pressing issues." [2] The Center's interdisciplinary team, which includes developmental pediatricians, psychologists, occupational therapists, and social workers, specializes in social and developmental concerns, depression and anxiety, regulatory concerns (including attention, hyperactivity, sleep, and eating problems), behavior challenges, parent-child relationship/attachment concerns, sibling rivalry, grief and other trauma, academic concerns, and developmental delays.
Developmental psychology is the scientific study of how and why humans grow, change, and adapt across the course of their lives. Originally concerned with infants and children, the field has expanded to include adolescence, adult development, aging, and the entire lifespan. Developmental psychologists aim to explain how thinking, feeling, and behaviors change throughout life. This field examines change across three major dimensions, which are physical development, cognitive development, and social emotional development. Within these three dimensions are a broad range of topics including motor skills, executive functions, moral understanding, language acquisition, social change, personality, emotional development, self-concept, and identity formation.
Attachment disorder is a broad term intended to describe disorders of mood, behavior, and social relationships arising from unavailability of normal socializing care and attention from primary care giving figures in early childhood. Such a failure would result from unusual early experiences of neglect, abuse, abrupt separation from caregivers between three months and three years of age, frequent change or excessive numbers of caregivers, or lack of caregiver responsiveness to child communicative efforts resulting in a lack of basic trust. A problematic history of social relationships occurring after about age three may be distressing to a child, but does not result in attachment disorder.
Reactive attachment disorder (RAD) is described in clinical literature as a severe and relatively uncommon disorder that can affect children, although these issues do occasionally persist into adulthood. RAD is characterized by markedly disturbed and developmentally inappropriate ways of relating socially in most contexts. It can take the form of a persistent failure to initiate or respond to most social interactions in a developmentally appropriate way—known as the "inhibited form". In the DSM-5, the "disinhibited form" is considered a separate diagnosis named "disinhibited attachment disorder".
Attachment theory is a psychological, evolutionary and ethological theory concerning relationships between humans. The most important tenet is that young children need to develop a relationship with at least one primary caregiver for normal social and emotional development. The theory was formulated by psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby.
Erikson's stages of psychosocial development, as articulated in the second half of the 20th century by Erik Erikson in collaboration with Joan Erikson, is a comprehensive psychoanalytic theory that identifies a series of eight stages that a healthy developing individual should pass through from infancy to late adulthood. According to Erikson's theory the results from each stage, whether positive or negative, influences the results of succeeding stages. Erikson published a book called Childhood and Society in 1950 that made his research well known on the eight stages of psychosocial development. Erikson was originally influenced by Sigmund Freud's psychosexual stages of development. He began by working with Freud's theories specifically, but as he began to dive deeper into biopsychosocial development and how other environmental factors affect human development, he soon progressed past Freud's theories and developed his own ideas. Erikson developed different substantial ways to create a theory about lifespan he theorized about the nature of personality development as it unfolds from birth through old age or death. He argued that the social experience was valuable throughout our life to each stage that can be recognizable by a conflict specifically as we encounter between the psychological needs and the surroundings of the social environment.
A form of child abuse, child neglect is an act of caregivers that results in depriving a child of their basic needs, such as the failure to provide adequate supervision, health care, clothing, or housing, as well as other physical, emotional, social, educational, and safety needs. All societies have established that there are necessary behaviours a caregiver must provide for a child to develop physically, socially, and emotionally. Causes of neglect may result from several parenting problems including mental disorders, unplanned pregnancy, substance use disorder, unemployment, over employment, domestic violence, and, in special cases, poverty.
Cognitive development is a field of study in neuroscience and psychology focusing on a child's development in terms of information processing, conceptual resources, perceptual skill, language learning, and other aspects of the developed adult brain and cognitive psychology. Qualitative differences between how a child processes their waking experience and how an adult processes their waking experience are acknowledged. Cognitive development is defined as the emergence of the ability to consciously cognize, understand, and articulate their understanding in adult terms. Cognitive development is how a person perceives, thinks, and gains understanding of their world through the relations of genetic and learning factors. There are four stages to cognitive information development. They are, reasoning, intelligence, language, and memory. These stages start when the baby is about 18 months old, they play with toys, listen to their parents speak, they watch tv, anything that catches their attention helps build their cognitive development.
Mary Dinsmore Ainsworth was an American-Canadian developmental psychologist known for her work in the development of the attachment theory. She designed the strange situation procedure to observe early emotional attachment between a child and its primary caregiver.
Early childhood intervention (ECI) is a support and educational system for very young children who have been victims of, or who are at high risk for child abuse and/or neglect as well as children who have developmental delays or disabilities. Some states and regions have chosen to focus these services on children with developmental disabilities or delays, but Early Childhood Intervention is not limited to children with these disabilities.
Developmentally appropriate practice is a perspective within early childhood education whereby a teacher or child caregiver nurtures a child's social/emotional, physical, and cognitive development. It is also described as a philosophy in child education that is based on child development knowledge where professionals base their instruction and care on research, standards, and recognized theory.
Child development involves the biological, psychological and emotional changes that occur in human beings between birth and the conclusion of adolescence.
Barbara Taylor Bowman is an American early childhood education expert/advocate, professor, and author. Her areas of expertise include early childhood care/education, educational equity for minority and low-income children, as well as intergenerational family support and roles. She has served on several boards and was the co-founder of Erikson Institute, where she pioneered the teaching of early childhood education and administration.
Samuel J. Meisels is an American academic in the areas of early childhood assessment, child development and educational practices that support the developmental needs of young children.
In the framework of the Cultural-Historical Activity Theory (CHAT) the leading activity is the activity, or cooperative human action, which plays the most essential role in child development during a given developmental period. Although many activities may play a role in a child's development at any given time, the leading activity is theorized to be the type of social interaction that is most beneficial in terms of producing major developmental accomplishments, and preparing the child for the next period of development. Through engaging in leading activities, a child develops a wide range of capabilities, including emotional connection with others, motivation to engage in more complex social activities, the creation of new cognitive abilities, and the restructuring of old ones.
Arnold J. Sameroff is an American developmental psychologist. He researches and writes about developmental theory and the factors that contribute to mental health and psychopathology, especially related to risk and resilience. Together with Michael Chandler he is known for developing the transactional model of development. He is one of the founders of the field of developmental psychopathology.
Maria Weigl Piers was an Austrian-born American psychologist, social worker, educator and prolific author, whose career was especially devoted to the psycho-social development of children. With Barbara T. Bowman and Lorraine Wallach, Piers founded the Chicago School for Early Childhood Education, later renamed the Erikson Institute for Early Childhood Education in recognition of the work of Erik Erikson, a close friend and colleague of Piers. Piers served as professor and dean at Erikson Institute, and brought her particular interest and expertise in psychoanalytic theory and practice to the Erikson curriculum. The Erikson Institute is widely recognized as one of the world's leading academic institutions in the field of early childhood development.
Edward Tronick is an American developmental psychologist best known for his studies of infants, carried out in 1970s, showing that when the connection between an infant and caregiver is broken, the infant tries to engage the caregiver, and then, if there is no response, the infant pulls back – first physically and then emotionally. He is a Director of Child Development Unit and Distinguished Professor at the University of Massachusetts Boston. He is a research associate in Newborn Medicine, a lecturer at Harvard Medical School, an associate professor at both the Graduate School of Education and the School of Public Health at Harvard. He is a member of the Boston Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, a past member of the Boston 'Process of Change' Group and a Founder and faculty member of the Touchpoints program. His research is funded by NICHD and NSF. Dr. Tronick along with Dr. Kristie Brandt founded the Infant-Parent Mental Health Postgraduate Certificate program. Fellows spent 12 interactive, intensive 3-day weekends meeting every other month at the University of Massachusetts' Boston Campus, to learn first hand from world luminaries and program faculty as well as each other. The program prepares professionals from multi-disciplinary backgrounds for certification in infant –family and early childhood mental health specialists.
Social emotional development represents a specific domain of child development. It is a gradual, integrative process through which children acquire the capacity to understand, experience, express, and manage emotions and to develop meaningful relationships with others. As such, social emotional development encompasses a large range of skills and constructs, including, but not limited to: self-awareness, joint attention, play, theory of mind, self-esteem, emotion regulation, friendships, and identity development.
Margaret R. Burchinal is a quantitative psychologist and statistician known for her research on child care. She is Senior Research Scientist and Director of the Data Management and Analysis Center of the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Deborah Lowe Vandell is a developmental psychologist and an expert on the impact of early child care on children's developmental trajectories and the benefits of children's participation in afterschool programs and other organized activities. She is the Founding Dean of the University of California, Irvine School of Education and Chancellor Professor of Education and Psychology.
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