When adoptions fail to happen, the effects can be devastating on children and the families who chose to adopt them What if you were an adopted child and someone tried to remove you from the family you had grown to love? In the last twenty years, changes in laws, judicial decisions, social welfare practices, and the availability of American children for adoption have led to an increase in disrupted adoptions. When Adoptions Go Wrong: Psychological and Legal Issues of Adoption Disruption examines the psychological and forensic aspects of adoption with an emphasis on how negative events can affect children and the families that choose to adopt themand how you can prevent those events from happening. When Adoptions Go Wrong is a comprehensive resource on the causes of interrupted adoptions, including changing profiles of adoptive parents who have new reasons for wanting to adopt. With the help of detailed case examples, this powerful book explores the impact of disruptions on the children, the legal issues of determining in whose best interests decisions are made, and possible methods of reducing the negative affects of those decisions on the children. It also stresses how important it is, for the professionals involved, to be aware of child development in the adoption process. Topics discussed in When Adoptions Go Wrong include: children's rights legal rights of gays to adopt tribal rights (Native Americans) open adoption individual state laws concerning adoption the media's coverage of child custody cases types of adoption the Baby Jessica case the Evan Scott case the Internet Twins inadequate social services family court and much more When Adoptions Go Wrong also suggests legislative measures to create uniformity in the way states handle adoption issues to help natural and adoptive parents in making difficult decisions. The book is invaluable for psychologists, judges and lawyers, social workers, and prospective adoptive parents.

When adoptions fail to happen, the effects can be devastating on children and the families who chose to adopt them What if you were an adopted child and someone tried to remove you from the family you had grown to love? In the last twenty years, changes in laws, judicial decisions, social welfare practices, and the availability of American children for adoption have led to an increase in disrupted adoptions. When Adoptions Go Wrong: Psychological and Legal Issues of Adoption Disruption examines the psychological and forensic aspects of adoption with an emphasis on how negative events can affect children and the families that choose to adopt themand how you can prevent those events from happening. When Adoptions Go Wrong is a comprehensive resource on the causes of interrupted adoptions, including changing profiles of adoptive parents who have new reasons for wanting to adopt. With the help of detailed case examples, this powerful book explores the impact of disruptions on the children, the legal issues of determining in whose best interests decisions are made, and possible methods of reducing the negative affects of those decisions on the children. It also stresses how important it is, for the professionals involved, to be aware of child development in the adoption process. Topics discussed in When Adoptions Go Wrong include: children's rights legal rights of gays to adopt tribal rights (Native Americans) open adoption individual state laws concerning adoption the media's coverage of child custody cases types of adoption the Baby Jessica case the Evan Scott case the Internet Twins inadequate social services family court and much more When Adoptions Go Wrong also suggests legislative measures to create uniformity in the way states handle adoption issues to help natural and adoptive parents in making difficult decisions. The book is invaluable for psychologists, judges and lawyers, social workers, and prospective adoptive parents.

Most students in training to become teachers, psychologists, physicians, and social workers as well as many practicing professionals in these disciplines do not get the opportunity to fully understand and appreciate the circumstances of children, parents, and teachers who have had to cope and adapt to childhood disorder. Most professionals in the field of childhood disorders are well trained in assessment and treatment methods and are aware of the clinical, theoretical, and empirical foundations of the work they do. In their training, they get some experience in diagnosing the educational, psychological, social, and medical problems of children through their supervised clinical internships. In their training and in their professional practice they get to interview, discuss, consult and collaborate with children and their families regarding developmental issues and treatment plans, however, they rarely get an opportunity to fully realize and understand what it is like to have a disorder and what it is like to be a mother, or father, or teacher of children with disorders.

This book provides an opportunity for students in training and professionals in the field to gain some awareness of the life journeys of some exceptional children, their families and their teachers.
Focuses on those childhood disorders that are most common or what are sometimes referred to as high incidence disorders such as learning disabilities, autism, behavior disorder, depression, and anxietyBeyond, a clinical, empirical, and theoretical description of childhood disorders or a personal account relative to one particular disorder, this book provides rich narratives of experience from multiple perspectives with respect to numerous childhood disordersProvides readers with insight by sharing examples of personal contexts and situations, significant life issues, challenges and barriers, successes, and recommendations relative to particular circumstances

All psychotherapists work on the basis of a person's early experience, even if many yet give surprisingly little weight to the primal stage--from before conception to infancy--yet primal awareness is growing. In the last fifteen years biochemical understanding of emotions / hormones and of nutrition has burgeoned. Many of these research studies are on Medline, particularly in relation to the brain and mental health or disorder. Meanwhile brain scans have rapidly advanced our understanding of feelings, behavior, and performance. The Unborn Child describes development from before conception and the lifelong effects of conditions on health and abilities. The mother's state during pregnancy--secure and happy, stressed or shocked, well-nourished or not--can affect her child-to-be physiologically and psychologically. This understanding can help in healing from early problems contributing to depression, compulsive behavior, or other problems. It is also invaluable towards generating children with their full genetic potential who are emotionally stable and basically healthy. The book is rooted in the authors' experience, authoritative case studies, and scientific references.This book, originally written by a Nobel Peace Prize winner and updated and extended by Simon H. House, is a fascinating insight into early child development, which will interest both those with special knowledge of the prenatal stage as well as anyone who is concerned with the health and well-being of children.

Advances in Child Development and Behavior is intended to ease the task faced by researchers, instructors, and students who are confronted by the vast amount of research and theoretical discussion in child development and behavior. The serial provides scholarly technical articles with critical reviews, recent advances in research, and fresh theoretical viewpoints. Volume 25 offers perspectives on children's activity memory, spatial representation, social reasoning, and metacognitive development.

Preventing Youth Problems provides information needed to prevent five of the most common, costly, and dangerous problems of adolescence: anti-social behavior, tobacco use, alcohol and drug abuse, and sexual behavior that risks disease and unwanted pregnancy. Over the past thirty years, scientific research on children and adolescents identified the major conditions influencing each of these problems.
Each of the chapters in this volume provides a concise summary of what is known about one of these five problem behaviors. Each chapter covers the following essential points:

- Incidence, prevalence, and cost of the problem, vital for gauging the importance of preventing the problem and for making the case for such efforts in public discussion of priorities;
- Biological and environmental influences which increase or decrease the likelihood of these problems; and,
- Principles, programs and policies that have been shown to reduce the incidence of each problem, information that can help in prevention of these behaviors.

First published in 2006. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Educating and caring for a child with autism is a severely difficult task, too often associated with frustration and disappointment. As a result, the inner development of these children is at times considered to be beyond the reach of parents and carers. This book challenges that assumption, exploring case studies where therapy based on a holistic approach has resulted in marked improvements in the children's behaviour and social integration. With an extended holistic programme, autistic children discover inner self-awareness and self-recognition, leading to first steps in relationships and social skills. The authors describe in detail their own practical experiences, as well as the findings of other experts in the field. This new third edition covers recent developments in diagnostic methods and approaches to treatment, including new case studies and a new chapter looking at the sensory aspect of autism and Sensory Integration Therapy. Well-researched and movingly written, this book has an essential, positive message for all those involved in the care and education of children with autism.

Jerome Bruner is one of the best-known and most influential psychologists of the twentieth century. He was one of the key figures in the so called 'cognitive revolution' that today dominates psychology around the world - but it is in the field of education that his influence has been especially felt. Bruner helped start the educational reform movement in the USA during the early 1960s and served on the President's Science Advisory Committee during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. He has since been involved in a variety of educational enterprises, including the founding of Head Start, of which he was a major architect. 'How one conceives of education', he wrote, 'we have finally come to recognize, is a function of how one conceives of the culture and its aims, professed and otherwise.' In this two volume set, Bruner has selected and assembled his most important writings about education. Each volume begins with a specially written Introduction, which sets the context and introduces the selection. These books are the ultimate guide to Jerome Bruner's most important and influential work - ideal for both students and academics who want to be able to follow the development of his thinking over his seventy-year career.

Monisha Pasupathi and Kate C. McLean Where Have You Been, Where Are You Going? Narrative Identity in Adolescence How can we help youth move from childhood to adulthood in the most effective and positive way possible? This is a question that parents, educators, researchers, and policy makers engage with every day. In this book, we explore the potential power of the stories that youth construct as one route for such movement. Our emphasis is on how those stories serve to build a sense of identity for youth and how the kinds of stories youth tell are informed by their broader contexts - from parents and friends to nationalities and history. Identity development, and in part- ular narrative identity development, concerns the ways in which adolescents must integrate their past and present and articulate and anticipate their futures (Erikson, 1968). Viewed in this way, identity development is not only unique to adol- cence (and emergent adulthood), but also intimately linked to childhood and to adulthood. The title for this chapter, borrowed from the Joyce Carol Oates story, highlights the precarious position of adolescence in relation to the construction of identity. In this story, the protagonist, poised between childhood and adulthood, navigates a series of encounters with relatively little awareness of either her childhood past or her potential adult futures. Her choices are risky and her future, at the end, looks dark.

How do children develop an understanding of people as psychological entities--as feeling, thinking beings? How do they come to understand human behavior as driven by desires and informed by reason? These questions are at the heart of contemporary research on children' s " theories of mind." Although there has been an enormous amount of research on this topic, nobody- --until now--has provided a coherent account that traces the development of theory of mind from birth to five years.
This book begins by analyzing the nature of commonsense psychology and exploring the developmental processes relevant to its development. It then describes the manner in which the child moves from being a newborn with perceptual sensitivities to people to an infant who can share psychological experiences with others to a young child who can recognize people, including both self and others, as individual psychological beings. Finally, the book shows how, throughout this developmental process, the child' s social interactive experiences are used by the child to generate ever more sophisticated forms of commonsense psychology.
"The Development of Commonsense Psychology" incorporates material from a wide range of research on early development, including infant social interaction, joint attention, self development, language development, theory of mind, and autobiographical memory.
Suitable as a text for senior undergraduate/honors courses or graduate level courses in early development, the primary audience for this book is developmental psychologists. However, it is also written in a way that will make it accessible and appealing to anyonewith an interest in social cognitive development in early childhood, including parents, educators, and policymakers.

This book provides a comprehensive overview of the process of building healthy early social and emotional relationships with infants from a developmental perspective. The book synthesizes current research on the contextual influences of attachment, family relationships, and caregiving practices on social-emotional development. Chapters examine the processes of socioemotional development-particularly in relationships with parents, other family members, and peers-and identify areas for promoting healthy attachments and resilience, improving caregiving skills, and intervening in traumatic and stressful situations. Chapters also present empirically-supported intervention and prevention programs focused on building early relationships from birth through three years of age. The book concludes with future directions for supporting infant mental health and its vital importance as a component of research, clinical and educational practice, and child and family policy. Topics featured in this book include: The effect of prenatal and neonatal attachment on social and emotional development. The impact of primary relationships and early experiences in toddlerhood. Toddler autonomy and peer awareness in the context of families and child care. Supporting early social and emotional relationships through The Legacy for Children (TM) Intervention. How to build early relationship programming across various cultures. Building Early Social and Emotional Relationships with Infants and Toddlers is a must-have reference for researchers, clinicians and professionals, and graduate students in the fields of infant mental health, developmental psychology, pediatrics, public health, family studies, and early childhood education.

Children can experience feelings they don't understand, causing them to act out. This Redleaf Quick Guide is filled with information on how to respond to an array of 12 common behavioral challenges including aggression, defiance, and separation anxiety, and offers prevention tips and developmental information that may affect young children's behavior.

In the World Library of Educationalists series, international experts themselves compile career-long collections of what they judge to be their finest pieces--extracts from books, key articles, salient research findings, major theoretical and/practical contributions--so the work can read them in a single manageable volume. Readers will be able to follow the themes and strands of their work and see their contribution to the development of a field.
A developmental psychologist by training, Howard Gardner has spent the last 30 years researching, thinking and writing about the development and education of the mind. He has contributed over 30 years researching, thinking and writing about the development and education of the mind. He has contributed over 30 books and 700 articles to the field. He is best known for his critique of the notion that intelligence is one single human intelligence that can be assessed through psychometric tests. Instead Gardner developed the theory of "multiple intelligence" which states that an individual has eight relatively autonomous intelligence:
- Language
- Music
- Emotional
- Logical-mathematical
- Spatial
- Kinesthetic
- Creative
- Interpersonal (understanding oneself)
This theory has proved popular, particularly with those who see the IQ testing a relatively narrow set of abilities.
In this book, he brings together over 20 of his key writings in one place. The book begins with a specially written Introduction, which gives an overview of Howard's career and contextualizes his selection in this book. Through his selection we can see the development of his thinking as well as the development of the field. This is the onlybook that offers this insight into this great scholar's work.

"Thinking Children" investigates the concept of 'child' from a philosophical perspective. Its aim is to come to an acceptable definition of 'child', and it is anticipated that such a definition will impact on how those seen as children are perceived in society.The author first explores the notions of personhood, self and identity, before reflecting on historical perspectives on childhood and the inclusion of children as active, participative, political and philosophical agents within society today.Children and adults are placed differently society, and through coming to an acceptable definition of 'child', this book seeks to determine whether such differential status is merited. "Thinking Children" proposes that we might consider children as beings and not becomings, and empower them to be active and participative citizens, since they are able and adept reasoners.

This series will include monographs and collections of studies devoted to the investigation and exploration of knowledge, information, and data-processing systems of all kinds, no matter whether human, (other) animal, or machine. Its scope is intended to span the full range of interests from classical problems in the philosophy of mind and philosophical psychology through issues in cognitive psychology and sociobiology (concerning the mental capabilities of other species) to ideas related to artificial intelligence and to computer science. While primary emphasis will be placed upon theoretical, conceptual, and epistemological aspects of these problems and domains, empirical, experimental, and methodological studies will also appear from time to time. Few areas of inquiry have generated as much interest and enthusiasm in recent times as has the discipline known as "evolutionary psychology," but its pretentions and its accomlishments have not always been properly understood. This collection brings together important work in psychology, anthropology, and the philosophy of science that contributes toward that goal, especially by emphasizing the role of natural selection and sexual selection as crucial factors in the evolution of cognitive mechanisms for information processing. The methodological studies that are presented here are bound to enhance appreciation for the scope and limits of this fascinating domain. The editor has produced a fascinating volume that should appeal to a broad and diverse audience.

Since the end of the sixties, Piagetian general theory with its inherent power of unification has gradually given way to a multitude of more specific models which is in evidence today. In this volume the authors concentrate on three perspectives namely cognitive, perceptuo-motor and neuropsychological development and attempt to coordinate these traditionally separated views. Good illustrations of these theoretical connections can be found in different chapters although the persistent isolation of these three domains still remains. However the authors believe efforts in developmental psychology must continue in the direction of domain interaction, for theoretical concepts as well as methodological tools.

Developmental Evaluation of Children and Adolescents: A Psychodynamic Guide offers an in-depth, multiperspective analysis of any delays, regressions, or aberrations in a child's developmental trajectory. Blackman and Dring help the evaluator understand the child's internal conflicts, as well as the family/environmental context in which the child functions. Chapters move longitudinally through the developmental stages. In each chapter, there are several "key questions" for evaluators to ask parents, fulfilling the need for clinicians to quickly assess children, followed by a longer question sheet and explanation of various answers to the questions for a more thorough assessment. Each chapter also provides a discussion of the child's phase and a table listing the questions and answers for quick reference. Finally, brief case studies demonstrate how the developmental history and the initial session with the child should be integrated. This book serves as an essential clinical guide to the developmental evaluation of children and will be suitable for all therapists working with children.

In recent years, newspaper articles, television specials, and other media events have focused on the numerous hard decisions faced by today's youth, often pointing to teen pregnancy, drug use, and delinquency as evidence of faulty judgment. Over the past 10 years, many groups - including parents, educators, policymakers, and researchers - have become concerned about the decision-making abilities of children and adolescents, asking why they make risky choices, how they can be taught to be better decision makers, and what types of age-related changes occur in decision making. This book serves as a starting point for those interested in considering new ways of thinking about the development of these issues. The purpose is to bring together the voices of several authors who are conducting cutting-edge research and developing new theoretical perspectives related to the development of judgment and decision making. The Development of Judgment and Decision Making in Children and Adolescents is divided into three parts: Part I presents three distinctive developmental models that offer different explanations of "what develops" and the relative importance of different cognitive components and experiential components that may be important for developing judgment and decision making skills. Part II emphasizes the emotional, cultural, and social aspects of decision making--three topics that have been influential in the adult literature on judgment and decision making but are just beginning to be explored in the developmental area. Part III provides three examples of research that applies developmental and decision making models to practical research questions. This book is intended for the professional market or for graduate courses on decision making or cognitive or social development.

For young children, two of the most important tasks they face are learning how to communicate and learning how to think about themselves and the social world around them. The premise of this book is that these two tasks are inherently linked. The communicative routines and language that children learn enable new modes of cognition, which in turn allow for more complex social interactions. The model of early child development that emerges is one in which equal importance is given to the socio-cultural context in which children are developing, and to the role played by children in actively constructing their own knowledge. Each of the chapters in this volume examines a unique aspect of this interplay between children's cognitive development and their social interactions. This book is organized into four thematic sections, each introduced by an integrative overview. The first section, Language and Cognition, examines the function of language in young children's lives. The second section, Intentionality and Communication, explores young children's understanding of intentions and their verbal and non-verbal communication. developments in cognitive and communicative skills transform children's participation in the process of teaching and learning. The final section, Narrative and Autobiographical Memory, looks at the effects of narrative on young children's understanding of themselves and their world. This book will be of great interest to anyone concerned with young children's learning and development, including developmental psychologists and educators. Each contributor is a leading researcher in developmental or educational psychology.

The Second Edition of the handbook incorporates notable research advances throughout its comprehensive, up-to-date examination of this diverse and maturing field. Integrative state-of-the-art models document the complex interplay of risk and protective factors and other variables contributing to normal and pathological development. New and updated chapters describe current refinements in assessment methods and offer the latest research findings from neuroscience. In addition, the Second Edition provides readers with a detailed review across the spectrum of salient topics, from the effects of early deprivation to the impact of puberty. As the field continues to shift from traditional symptom-based concepts of pathology to a contemporary, dynamic paradigm, the Second Edition addresses such key topics pertinent to childhood anxiety as: * Early childhood disorders, including failure to thrive and attachment disorders. * Aggression, ADHD, and other disruptive conditions. * Developmental models of depression, anxiety, self-injury/suicide, and OCD. * The autism spectrum and other chronic developmental disorders. * Child maltreatment and trauma disorders. The Handbook of Child and Adolescent Anxiety Disorders, Second Edition of the handbook is a discipline-defining, forward-looking, essential resource for researchers, clinicians, scientist-practitioners, and graduate students in such fields as developmental psychology, child and adolescent psychiatry, social work, child and school psychology, educational psychology, and pediatrics.

As the Baby Boomer cohort moves from middle to later adulthood, it is likely this generation will redefine what it means to age. Growing older will no longer be synonymous with loss and decline. In fact, it is true that the majority of older adults today live fulfilling lives. This special issue discusses ways in which older adults can age successfully--that is--how individuals can maintain their physical and cognitive health, as well as maintain a healthy engagement with life. Also addressed are the universal challenges faced by older adults in their pursuit to age successfully. The objective of this collection is to serve as a stimulus to future research on aging and change in the later years of life. It presents an outstanding array of articles that cover a range of central issues in this area of study. Each author provides a unique insight into the mystery and challenge that awaits us all: the ability to age successfully.