Books in the The Developing Child series

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.

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.

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.

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

In this revised and expanded edition of her study of 1982, Alison Clarke-Stewart draws on extensive research to survey the social, political and economic landscape of daycare between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s.

In this fascinating introduction to primate minds, Gomez 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.

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.

"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.

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.

This book, written by the codirectors 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.

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.

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.