Arnold Gesell

Arnold Gesell was an American psychologist and pediatrician, born in Alma, Wisconsin in 1880 and died in 1961, known for his research on child development and child hygiene. He studied at the University of Wisconsin and took his doctorate at Clark University in 1906, where the president, G. Stanley Hall, had founded the child study movement, and he gained his medical degree at Yale in 1915. At Yale he developed the Clinic of Child Development, and as school psychologist for the Connecticut State Board of Education he became the first school psychologist in the United States. His ideas became known as Gesell's Maturational Theory of child development, and he published the Gesell Developmental Schedules, a series of summaries of how development normally unfolds in infancy and childhood. His popular books, such as The Child from Five to Ten, carried his ideas to parents.