Prenatal Development

Theories and ideas for understanding human life-span development, particularly for behavioral and psychological development, emphasize postnatal development and postnatal exposures. That interest is intensely subdivided according to theories, disciplines, and research traditions. For example, much of the field of developmental psychology focuses on the normative changes in social, emotional, cognitive, and physical health in the first two decades of life. The implicit notion is that these early years compose a particularly important period in the life span for understanding development qua development, and that there might also be salutary lessons for study of these years for understanding how best to promote healthy development. Somewhat less attention focuses on development in the later years, although that is fast changing because there is now wide appreciation for the urgent need to understand individual differences in (older) aging, and why differences in behavioral and somatic health from individual to individual may become accentuated in the last decades of life. By comparison, the prenatal period is not much emphasized in theories of life-span human development—that is, aside from a generally undifferentiated tacit respect for the prenatal period and recognition of a few specific prenatal priorities, such as how prenatal maternal smoking causes preterm birth or that folate is needed to prevent neural tube defects such as spina bifida. This entry highlights recent advances elevating the importance of the prenatal period for life-course somatic, behavioral, and psychological development, and it positions the study of prenatal exposures as offering a compelling—sometimes complementary and sometimes competing—account for individual differences in life-span human development.