The Developing Child

How do children make talk “work?” Adults usually regard talk as a simple means of conveying information. Garvey explains the importance of talk to children’s socialization and development and shows why talk is an integral and revealing part of the child’s life that reflects important changes in thinking and social interaction.

The sibling relationship, as any parent with two or more children knows, is an extraordinarily intense one: young brothers and sisters love and hate, play and fight, tease and mock each other with a devastating lack of inhibition. In this timely and unusual glimpse into the world of the child, Dunn argues that in fighting, bullying, or comforting, very young sisters and brothers possess a far deeper understanding of others than psychologists have supposed.

Becoming literate requires mastering a complex set of skills, behaviors, and attitudes that makes it possible to receive and communicate meaning through the written word. McLane and McNamee provide a fresh examination of this process in light of recent research.

Until very recently, almost all books on infancy assumed basic infant immaturity. Remarkably, as Tiffany Field shows in her survey of recent research, investigators are discovering that infants possess sophisticated perceptual skills, such as hearing, even before birth. Newborns can sense touch and motion, discriminate tastes and smells, recognize their mother’s voice, and imitate facial expressions. In fact, the newborn is an active learner, looking, reaching, sucking, and grimacing from its first moments in its new environment. Field provides a readable account of our current knowledge about infant development.

Garvey explores some of the more promising new directions in the study of children’s play and summarizes the findings of recent research.

The Caring Child provides the most current account of our understanding of the motivations behind prosocial behaviors and how these motives develop and are elicited. Eisenberg broadens our concept of the moral potential of children and shifts the focus from censoring antisocial behaviors to the active promotion of kindness and caring in children.

Daycare is a brief and readable summary of the best information modern “baby science” has to offer about how daycare affects young children and how to tell the difference between daycare that helps and daycare that hurts. This is a book that covers all the practical problems daycare parents must face and suggests ways to solve them.

“Mind” is a cultural construct that children discover as they acquire the language and social practices of their culture, enabling them to make sense of the world. Astington provides a valuable overview of current research and of the consequences of this discovery for intellectual and social development.

Thornton surveys research from a broad range of perspectives in order to explore why successful problem-solving depends less on how smart we are—or, as the pioneering psychologist Jean Piaget claimed, how advanced is our skill in logical reasoning—and more on the factual knowledge we acquire as we learn and interpret cues from the world around us.

In this new book, Parke considers the father–child relationship within the “family system” and the wider society. Using the “life course” view of fathers, he demonstrates that men enact their fatherhood in a variety of ways in response to their particular social and cultural circumstances.

As they make sense of the features of autism at every level of intellectual functioning across the life span, the authors weave together clinical vignettes, research, methodological considerations, and historical accounts. The result is a compelling, comprehensive view of the disorder, true to human experience and scientific observation alike.

A remarkable mother–daughter collaboration balances the respected views of a well-known scholar with the fresh perspective of a younger colleague in a comprehensive overview of the theory and practice of language acquisition.

In this lively book, Philippe Rochat makes a case for an ecological approach to human development. Looking at the ecological niche infants occupy, he describes how infants develop capabilities and conceptual understanding in relation to three interconnected domains: the self, objects, and other people.

In the midst of the largest immigration wave in history, America is once again contemplating a future in which new arrivals will play a crucial role in reworking the fabric of the nation. This book, written by the co-directors of the largest ongoing longitudinal study of immigrant children and their families, offers a clear, broad, interdisciplinary view of who the immigrant children are and what their future might hold.

In this fascinating introduction to primate minds, Juan Carlos Gómez identifies evolutionary resemblances—and differences—between human children and other primates. He argues that primate minds are best understood not as fixed collections of specialized cognitive capacities, but instead as a range of abilities that can surpass their original adaptations.

Can a woman’s emotional attitude toward pregnancy cause “morning sickness,” influence the smoothness of labor and delivery, or shape the child’s behavior after birth? Can the mother–child relationship be adversely affected by separation immediately after birth? Is the quality of the birth experience improved by home delivery? What are the psychological effects of pain-killing drugs on mother and child? What, if anything, does the unborn infant see, hear, and feel inside the womb? Is birth a psychological trauma for the child and, if so, how can it be alleviated? Dr. Macfarlane refuses to provide easy answers to any of these questions.

Quality childcare, the authors show, may be more beneficial to children than staying home. Although children who spend many hours in care may be more unruly than children at home, those who attend quality programs tend to be cognitively ahead of their peers. They are just as attached to their mothers and benefit from engaging with other children.

Anyone who knows children understands the importance of their relationships with one another. But until recently, psychology has offered little to illuminate children’s friendships, assuming instead that development is largely determined by the relationship between parent and child. Now, however, a new psychology of the child’s social world has begun to take shape. Zick Rubin’s book provides a graceful introduction to this work, written in the clear, nontechnical style that readers have come to expect of the Developing Child series.

This book makes it clear that many of the problems of retardation are caused by the misunderstanding and intolerance of societies that place extraordinary emphasis on mental ability and its measurable manifestations: school achievement and IQ. It is just this sort of intolerance and misunderstanding that Edgerton seeks to dispel.