This is the first book to provide a comprehensive overview of the history of developmental psychology, from the pre-scientific era to the present day. Covers the first research published in Germany, America, and France during the late 19th century Examines the work and influence of key international scholars in the area Incorporates the contributions of psychologists from diverse backgrounds Pays attention to the historical research on development in adulthood and old age Highlights the relationship between the growth of developmental psychology and renewed interest in child-rearing practices

This book explores and underlines the thesis that developmental psychology cannot function fruitfully without systematic historical scholarship. Scientific thinking not only depends on empirical-analytical research, but also requires self-reflection and critical thinking about the discipline’s foundations and history. The relevance of history was made especially clear in the writings of William Kessen, who analyzed how both children and child development are shaped "by the larger cultural forces of political maneuverings, practical economics, and implicit ideological commitments." As a corollary, he emphasized that the science of developmental psychology itself is culturally and historically shaped in significant ways. Discussing the implications of these insights in the book’s introduction, Koops and Kessel stress that we need a Historical Developmental Psychology. In the book’s following chapters, historians of childhood – Mintz, Stearns, Lassonde, Sandin, and Vicedo – demonstrate how conceptions of childhood vary across historical time and sociocultural space. These foundational variations are specified by these historians and by developmental psychologists – Harris and Keller – in the research domains of emotions, attachment, and parenting. This collection demonstrates the importance of bridging, both intellectually and institutionally, the gap between the research of historians, and both current and future research of developmental psychologists. This book was originally published as a special issue of the European Journal of Developmental Psychology.

In 1900, Ellen Key wrote the international bestseller The Century of the Child. In this enormously influential book, she proposed that the world's children should be the central work of society during the twentieth century. Although she never thought that her "century of the child" would become a reality, in fact it had much more resonance than she could have imagined. The idea of the child as a product of a protective and coddling society has given rise to major theories and arguments since Key's time. For the past half century, the study of the child has been dominated by two towering figures, the psychologist Jean Piaget and the historian Philippe Ariès. Interest in the subject has been driven in large measure by Ariès's argument that adults failed even to have a concept of childhood before the thirteenth century, and that from the thirteenth century to the seventeenth there was an increasing "childishness" in the representations of children and an increasing separation between the adult world and that of the child. Piaget proposed that children's logic and modes of thinking are entirely different from those of adults. In the twentieth century this distance between the spheres of children and adults made possible the distinctive study of child development and also specific legislation to protect children from exploitation, abuse, and neglect. Recent students of childhood have challenged the ideas those titans promoted; they ask whether the distancing process has gone too far and has begun to reverse itself. In a series of essays, Beyond the Century of the Child considers the history of childhood from the Middle Ages to modern times, from America and Europe to China and Japan, bringing together leading psychologists and historians to question whether we unnecessarily infantilized children and unwittingly created a detrimental wall between the worlds of children and adults. Together these scholars address the question whether, a hundred years after Ellen Key wrote her international sensation, the century of the child has in fact come to an end.

This text proposes a theory of mental development in the child, which incorporates the stance that no consistent view of mental development in the individual could possibly be reached without a doctrine of the race development of consciousness--ie., the great problem of the evolution of mind. The earliest chapters (1-6) are devoted to the statement of the genetic problem, with reports of the facts of infant life and the methods of investigating them, and the mere teasing out of the strings of law on which the facts are beaded--the principles of Suggestion, Habit, Accommodation, etc. Chapter 5 gives a detailed analysis of one voluntary function, Handwriting. Then follows the theory of adaptation, stated in general terms in Chapters 7 and 8; and afterwards comes a genetic view in detail (Chaps. 9 to 16) of the progress of mental development in its great stages, Memory, Association, Attention, Thought, Self-consciousness, and Volition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2004 APA, all rights reserved).

This handbook provides a comprehensive survey of what is now known about psychological development, from birth to biological maturity, and it highlights how cultural, social, cognitive, neural, and molecular processes work together to yield human behavior and changes in human behavior.

This book documents my return to a topic that has always been one of my closest interests: the systematic study of intellectual and political history. I became involved in historical studies while in high school and continued this work during the years that I spent as a metalworker in a shipyard and in a factory. Indeed, I succeeded in being admitted to the University of Hamburg only after submitting a comparative analysis of the history of early Greek and early Western philosophy to the late Professor G. Ralfs. He gave me much encouragement and remained one of my main academic sponsors during the years in Hamburg. Recently, I translated into English the manuscript that had opened the doors of the university for me, and ex tended it to the history of psychology. The results present the unfolding of an intellectual theme as if it were an historical dialogue. They (chaps. 10 and 11) are, perhaps, controversial achievements, but they are among my proudest. Before I began my studies in psychology and philosophy, I spent al most two years in physics and mathematics. Subsequently, I began to approach psychology with a natural-science emphasis. Even when I began to shift my attention from general experimental to developmental psychol ogy (especially gerontology), I continued to maintain this orientation and deemphasized my historical interest. This interest did not find any reso nance in the developmental research and theory of these years anyhow.

Originally published in 1983, the purpose of this book was to discuss the relations between philosophy and developmental psychology, as those relations existed over the course of the history of the discipline and as they existed at that time. Although not all portions of developmental psychology are surveyed, major proponents of several key areas are represented (e.g. organismic developmental theory, stage theory, life-span-developmental psychology, and the ecological approach to development). In addition, discussion of many currently prominent issues are included (e.g. constancy and change in human development, the use of multivariate models and methods, the role of the context in individual development, and the use of developmental theory in public policy and political arenas). The diversity of approaches and of interests present in the book are representative of the breadth of theoretical and empirical interests found in developmental psychology at the time.