Urie Bronfenbrenner

o American psychologist Urie Bronfenbrenner

formulated the Ecological Systems Theory
to explain how social environments affect
children’s development.
o This theory emphasizes the importance of
studying children in multiple environments,
known as ecological systems, in the attempt
to understand their development.
 Microsystem

• The child is influenced

by the people he/she
has direct contact with
like, parents, family,
friends, school etc.
 Microsystem
• Bronfenbrenner proposed
that many of these
interactions are bi-
directional: how children
react to people in their
microsystem will also affect
how these people treat the
children in return.
 Mesosystem
• The mesosystem encompasses
the interaction of the different
microsystems which children find
themselves in.
• Involves linkages between home
and school, between peer group
and family, and between family
and community.
Mesosystem
 Exosystem
• A setting that does not
involve the person as an
active participant, but
still affects them.
 Exosystem
• pertains to the linkages that
may exist between two or
more settings, one of which
may not contain the
developing children but
affect them indirectly
nonetheless.
 Macrosystem
• Is the largest and most distant
collection of people and places to
the children that still have significant
influences on them. This ecological
system is composed of the children’s
cultural patterns and values,
specifically their dominant beliefs
and ideas, as well as traditions and
socioeconomic status.
 Chronosystem
• Urie Bronfenbrenner stated
that human development is
“powerfully shaped by
conditions and events
occurring during the historical
period through which the
person lives’’
(Bronfenbrenner, 1999).
 Chronosystem
• Bronfenbrenner and Morris
integrated and described
time as an element that
exerts influence on
development over the
lifespan and even across
generations (Bronfenbrenner
& Morris, 2006).
 Chronosystem
• considers time as an
influence on human
development
(Bronfenbrenner, 1988;
Edinete & Tudge, 2013).
 Chronosystem
• These major events could be
within the person’s life itself or
external such as natural disasters,
pandemics, or global civil rights
protests. Students experiencing
such traumatic events may require
an advising structure that is closely
aligned with mental health
services (Firestein, 2019).