Exploration: an overarching focus for holistic development

Promoting the development of health and well-being across the lifespan involves navigating a complex and intertwined labyrinth of biological, social, and environmental factors that change over time. Yet, approaches to positively impact developmental trajectories of these factors remain relatively siloed in academe and are generally discipline specific with a singular focus in their application (e.g., physical activity, motor development, social-emotional development, cognitive development). Discipline-specific interventions also are derived from a multitude of theoretical frameworks that are generally applied to only one domain of development. Attempting to amalgamate and apply various frameworks to promote holistic development would be useful, yet arduous and impractical based on our history of discipline-specific approaches. However, the process of identifying simplicity from complexity has been applied in many domains of science (e.g., neuroscience, biology, ecology, physics) in order to promote a more palatable, yet comprehensively encapsulating, conceptualization of complex mechanisms/phenomena. To quote Einstein, “It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience” 1 (p. 165). Unfortunately, our siloed approaches to interventions designed to promote human development have, perhaps, been oversimplified and void of the essence of the complexity of human development. Quoting another eminent researcher (with a focus on human development), “It all comes back to the importance of action for learning and the fundamental interrelatedness of the different parts of the human being (the social, emotional, cognitive, and physical parts) and of all human beings to one another […]. The best and most efficient way to foster any one of those (such as academic achievement) is to foster all of them” 2 (p. 789). Thus, is it possible to provide a unifying theme for intervention that places an apriori focus on, and applies, an overarching catalyst of development to any intervention to promote holistic development? The purpose of this commentary is to address this challenge, zooming out our view to encompass a variety of theoretical approaches without constraints on their different philosophical underpinnings. We propose a cross-boundary unification directive, converging on a critical component for any intervention that concomitantly illustrates the “why” and “how” of development that can be applied to any specific theoretical approach to this issue. Inherent in such a proposition would be the understanding that a unifying intervention directive should demonstrate a comprehensive understanding of human development, be applicable across any developmental domain, and be both justifiable and pragmatic. We propose that exploration should be this unified intervention directive for human intervention and provide evidence, and exemplars, that can be promoted from this simplistic unifying theme.