How we raise young children is one of today's most highly personalized and sharply politicized issues, in part because each of us can claim some level of "expertise." The debate has intensified as discoveries about our development-in the womb and in the first months and years-have reached the popular media. How can we use our burgeoning knowledge to assure the well-being of all young children, for their own sake as well as for the sake of our nation? Drawing from new findings, this book presents important conclusions about nature-versus-nurture, the impact of being born into a working family, the effect of politics on programs for children, the costs and benefits of intervention, and other issues. The committee issues a series of challenges to decision makers regarding the quality of child care, issues of racial and ethnic diversity, the integration of children's cognitive and emotional development, and more. Authoritative yet accessible, From Neurons to Neighborhoods presents the evidence about "brain wiring" and how kids learn to speak, think, and regulate their behavior. It examines the effect of the climate-family, child care, community-within which the child grows.

Research has documented the reciprocal effects of exceptionality and secondary psychosocial and behavioral characteristics. This in-depth handbook examines the categories of exceptionality most often described in educational, behavioral, and health practices. Leading authorities from psychology, education, and medicine evaluate the key characteristics of particular exceptionalities from the vantage point of theory, research, assessment, and intervention.

This book is the product of the efforts of a number of people dating back to 1956, when Professor T. Kemp, then head of the University Institute for Human Genetics in Copenhagen, proposed a study on the importance of x-ray irradiation in pregnant women. Under the guidance of Professors Dyhre Trolle and Preben Plum of the Uni versity Hospital in Copenhagen, the investigation was expanded to deal with prenatal and perinatal factors of importance for the development of the infant. The corpus of medical data that resulted from these efforts was collected and organized by Drs. Bengt Zachau-Christiansen and Aage Villumsen. The project's birth cohort included all deliveries that took place at the State University Hospital, Rigshospitalet, Copenhagen, over a two-year period from 1959 to 1961. As part of the perinatal study, the mothers and children were subjected to regular and thorough medical examinations during pregnancy and through the first year of the child's life. The detailed data from these examinations, as well as information about treatment administered, were systematically collected and coded.

This major new textbook by Jaan Valsiner focuses on the interface between cultural psychology and developmental psychology. Intended for students from undergraduate level upwards, the book provides a wide-ranging overview of the cultural perspective on human development, with illustrations from pre-natal development to adulthood. A key feature is the broad coverage of theoretical and methodological issues which have relevance to this truly interdisciplinary field of enquiry encompassing developmental psychology, cultural anthropology and comparative sociology. The text is organized into five coherent parts: Part 1: Developmental theory and methodology; Part 2: Analysis of environments for human development Part 3:

Families, communities and societies influence children's learning and development in many ways. This is the first handbook devoted to the understanding of the nature of environments in child development. Utilizing Urie Bronfenbrenner's idea of embedded environments, this volume looks at environments from the immediate environment of the family (including fathers, siblings, grandparents and day-care personnel) to the larger environment including schools, neighborhoods, geographic regions, countries and cultures. Understanding these embedded environments and the ways in which they interact is necessary to understand development.