Always reflective of the latest research and thinking in the field, Patricia Miller’s acclaimed text offers an ideal way to help students understand and distinguish the major theoretical schools of child development. This fully updated new edition includes a new focus on biological theories of development, and offers new instructor resource materials.

Always reflective of the latest research and thinking in the field, Patricia Miller’s acclaimed text offers an ideal way to help students understand and distinguish the major theoretical schools of child development. This fully updated new edition includes a new focus on biological theories of development.

Child Development: Theories and Critical Perspectives provides an engaging and perceptive overview of both well-established and recent theories in child and adolescent psychology. This unique summary of traditional scientific perspectives alongside critical post-modern thinking will provide readers with a sense of the historical development of different schools of thought. The authors also place theories of child development in philosophical and cultural contexts, explore links between them, and consider the implications of theory for practice in the light of the latest thinking and developments in implementation and translational science. Early chapters cover mainstream theories such as those of Piaget, Skinner, Freud, Maccoby and Vygotsky, whilst later chapters present interesting lesser-known theorists such as Sergei Rubinstein, and more recent influential theorists such as Esther Thelen. The book also addresses lifespan perspectives and systems theory, and describes the latest thinking in areas ranging from evolutionary theory and epigenetics, to feminism, the voice of the child and Indigenous theories. The new edition of Child Development has been extensively revised to include considerable recent advances in the field. As with the previous edition, the book has been written with the student in mind, and includes a number of useful pedagogical features including further reading, discussion questions, activities, and websites of interest. Child Development: Theories and Critical Perspectives will be essential reading for students on advanced courses in developmental psychology, education, social work and social policy, and the lucid style will also make it accessible to readers with little or no background in psychology.

This book places the major theories of development in historical and contemporary context, and provides frameworks for understanding and perceiving the significance of the research findings in developmental psychology.

The result of extensive scholarship and consultation with leading scholars, this text introduces students to twenty-four theorists and compares and contrasts their theories on how we develop as individuals. Emphasizing the theories that build upon the developmental tradition established by Rousseau, this text also covers theories in the environmental/learning tradition.

Something instructive occurred in the process of entitling the present collection. Both editor and publisher sought a simple and succinct rubric for the various pieces of work. But they rapidly and reluctantly reached the consensus that, by either intellectual or marketing criteria, the inser tion of the adjective "psychological" to qualify the noun "development" was a communicative necessity. Much to the chagrin of the develop mental psychologist, the term development still connotes-to the world at large as well as the general community of publishers, librarians, and computer archivists-the modernization of nation states. Inside and outside the university, I find that, when asked, "What are you in terested in?" I am not at liberty to reply, "The concept of development," without being absorbed immediately into a discussion of Third World studies. The approach of the present volume should be taken as an exhortation to psychologists to take the genealogy of "development'' seriously. The history of the discipline is not so different from the histo ry of the word and, as we shall discover, the concern with developmen tal progress cannot easily be separated from the urge for dominion. This volume presents a selection from the recent critical scholarship on psychological development. The emphasis is on rethinking the field of developmental psychology at the level of theory.