In 2015, Sheryl Sandberg's husband, Dave Goldberg, died suddenly at the age of forty-eight. Sandberg and her two young children were devastated, and she was certain that their lives would never have real joy or meaning again. Just weeks later, Sandberg was talking with a friend about the first father-child activity without a father. They came up with a plan for someone to fill in. But I want Dave, she cried. Her friend put his arm around her and said, Option A is not available. So let's just kick the shit out of Option B. Everyone experiences some form of Option B. We all deal with loss: jobs lost, loves lost, lives lost. The question is not whether these things will happen but how we face them when they do. Thoughtful, honest, revealing and warm, Option B weaves Sandberg's experiences coping with adversity with new findings from Adam Grant and other social scientists. The book features stories of people who recovered from personal and professional hardship, including illness, injury, divorce, job loss, sexual assault and imprisonment. These people did more than recover-many of them became stronger. Option B offers compelling insights for dealing with hardships in our own lives and helping others in crisis. It turns out that post-traumatic growth is common-even after the most devastating experiences many people don't just bounce back but actually bounce forward. And pre-traumatic growth is also possible: people can build resilience even if they have not experienced tragedy. Sandberg and Grant explore how we can raise strong children, create resilient communities and workplaces, and find meaning, love and joy in our lives.

Here is a book that challenges the very basis of the way psychologists have studied child development. According to Urie Bronfenbrenner, one of the world’s foremost developmental psychologists, laboratory studies of the child’s behavior sacrifice too much in order to gain experimental control and analytic rigor. Laboratory observations, he argues, too often lead to “the science of the strange behavior of children in strange situations with strange adults for the briefest possible periods of time.” To understand the way children actually develop, Bronfenbrenner believes that it will be necessary to observe their behavior in natural settings, while they are interacting with familiar adults over prolonged periods of time. This book offers an important blueprint for constructing such a new and ecologically valid psychology of development. The blueprint includes a complete conceptual framework for analysing the layers of the environment that have a formative influence on the child. This framework is applied to a variety of settings in which children commonly develop, ranging from the pediatric ward to daycare, school, and various family configurations. The result is a rich set of hypotheses about the developmental consequences of various types of environments. Where current research bears on these hypotheses, Bronfenbrenner marshals the data to show how an ecological theory can be tested. Where no relevant data exist, he suggests new and interesting ecological experiments that might be undertaken to resolve current unknowns. Bronfenbrenner’s groundbreaking program for reform in developmental psychology is certain to be controversial. His argument flies in the face of standard psychological procedures and challenges psychology to become more relevant to the ways in which children actually develop. It is a challenge psychology can ill-afford to ignore.

Takes a comprehensive Darwinian interpretation of human development. Looking at the entire range of human evolutionary history, Konner tells the story of how cross-cultural and universal characteristics of our growth from infancy to adolescence became rooted in genetically inherited characteristics of the human brain--From publisher description.

Selected as a Book of the Year by the Financial Times ' The Gardener and the Carpenter should be required reading for anyone who is, or is thinking of becoming a parent' Financial Times Caring deeply about our children is part of what makes us human. Yet the thing we call 'parenting' is a surprisingly new invention. In the past thirty years, the concept of parenting and the huge industry surrounding it have transformed childcare into obsessive, controlling, and goal-orientated labour intended to create a particular kind of child, and therefore a particular kind of adult. Drawing on the study of human evolution and her own cutting-edge scientific research into how children learn, Gopnik shows that although caring for children is profoundly important, it is not a matter of shaping them to turn out a particular way. Children are designed to be messy and unpredictable, playful and imaginative, and to be very different both from their parents and from each other. The variability and flexibility of childhood lets them innovate, create, and survive in an unpredictable world. 'Parenting' won't make children learn - but caring parents let children learn by creating a secure, loving environment. In The Gardener and the Carpenter , the pioneering developmental psychologist and philosopher Alison Gopnik argues that the familiar twenty-first-century picture of parenting is profoundly wrong - it's not just based on bad science, it's bad for children and their parents too.

"Eva Moskowitz has built a national reputation as the founder and leader of Success Academy Charter Schools, one of the country's most highly regarded networks of schools, but while most people know Eva for her success in educating 20,000 mainly low-income students who are routinely accepted to our nation's best universities, she has also been responsible for raising three children of her own. In A+ Parenting, Eva shares what she has learned both as a parent and an educator about raising children to be enthusiastic and successful learners. Eva's most important message is that parents can and should play a critical role in their children's intellectual development. Each year, children only spend about 180 days in school; how they spend the remaining 185 days is up to their parents. Children who continue to learn when they are out of school will make far more progress than those who don't, but parents need not attempt to recreate school at home. Instead, they can encourage their children to engage in fun activities that will have a huge impact on their creativity, intellectual curiosity, and attention span. A+ Parenting is every parent's must-have guide to enriching every aspect of a child's life, from the morning carpool to the soccer field to the dinner table-without having to hire tutors or carve out more hours in the day. Moskowitz explains how to take the time you're already spending with your children and make it more fulfilling and intellectually stimulating for them. The book is full of practical guidance such as: Which extracurricular activities are best for a child's development. How children can learn by watching movies and playing games-and why you should reach for chess or Monopoly over checkers or Candyland. How to help your child overcome a learning disability and ensure it doesn't undermine their self-confidence. Why getting angry at children doesn't work but expressing disappointment does. In addition to advice, this book is filled with carefully curated lists of educational activities, including games to play, movies to watch, puzzles to solve, books to read, music to listen to, and experiments to perform. These activities, supported with love and joy, are all parents need to turn their children into lifelong learners"--

Why is play important in the lives of children? What crucial aspects of learning are being neglected in the current near-elimination of recess time in public schools? Playing for Keeps, co-authored by the well-known writer and educational leader Deborah Meier, and two colleagues with equally long experience in schools, explores these questions. Based on close observations on a public school playground, the book shows children at play in a relatively natural, unstructured environment. The reader is virtually there, seeing, listening in, able to appreciate the children's curiosity, humor, intelligence, and inventiveness. Readers will recognize the children's voices and ways of thinking, and perhaps be reminded of their own childhood, their own children, or the children they teach. The authors comment on the observations, adding to the reader's own perceptions. This lively, engaging book makes a strong case for the importance of free exploration, wonder, imagination, and play to the learning and growth of children. It should contribute significantly to the understanding of all those concerned, professionally or personally, with the welfare of our school-age population.

Through the evaluation and integration of developmental theories, this volume proposes a new structural/behavioral model of development. Dr. Horowitz's model helps account for both the behavioral development of children (with extensions across the life-span) and for the universal and non-universal characteristics in human behavioral development. Exploring Developmental Theories also sheds a new and different light on the nature- nurture or heredity-environment controversy and on the topic of continuity and discontinuity in development. Exploring Developmental Theories: *examines the concepts of stage, structure, and systems; organismic theory; and general system theory; *analyzes open and closed systems as well as organismic and mechanistic world views; *integrates the concepts associated with organismic and mechanist world views; *examines learning mechanisms and processes that foster the acquisition of behavior, and *discusses the strengths and weaknesses of Gessel, Piaget, and behaviorism in accounting for behavioral development.

This volume examines the importance of prenatal, birth, and postnatal factors in determining the extent of "risk" that may be predicted for an infant in the first year of life and in early childhood. It offers the reader an up-to-date review of major research efforts toward understanding the circumstances that insure optimal developmental opportunities for all children. In the first chapter, Dr. Horowitz presents some of the basic issues concerning vulnerability of young infants and developmental hazards. Papers by Arnold Sameroff and Herbert Leiderman consider early infant-environment interactions as they relate to normal developmental processes and social bonding. Lewis Lipsitt examines data from the Collaborative Perinatal Project and from studies on Sudden Infant death Syndrome to propose some factors that contribute to the SIDS phenomenon. Trygg Engen reviews his research on the conditions that influence children to ingest harmful substances. The concluding chapter considers the implications of these papers for understanding environmental and biological conditions as they affect the developmental course of the infant and young child.

On New Year's Eve 1985 a 17 year old girl killed her classmate. Her motive was simple: she needed money to buy a dress. The gilrl was adjudicated. But there was one simple human question left: How could she? You can follow along as the author of Parenting For Everyone makes his own investigation into the murder and finds unique moral answers. His approach is focused on understanding of the nature of healthy human development. He discovers secrets of raising good and morally intelligent children for which parents can feel confident that everything will be alright with their children. Forty years of writing about children and for children with simultaneous research of educational theories and methods of many philosophers and humanists in the field, such as Rousseau, Socrates, Bronfenbrenner, Vygotsky, Spock, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Korczak, Sukhomlinsky challenged the author to discover several stable laws of a child spirit development. These humanitarian ideas he brought into the field of parenting, a science about the art of upbringing children in families. For ten years of deep investigation of the origin of humanity in people he gathered, analyzed and systematized those ideas into a complete, integral system, which was described in his book Parenting For Everyone.Parenting For Everyone is three comprehensive books in one. You will find 17 open chapters out of 245 at www.ParentingForEveryone.com "In a world such as ours, where so many of our freedoms are quietly pulled out from under us, and where we have certainly long lost our inner freedom of thought, along comes a very encouraging book: Parenting for Everyone. The effort Aigul Aubanova and Victor Dull have put forth in translating the work of legendary Russian educator Simon Soloveychik feels like a breath of fresh air ready to invigorate every serious teacher and parent." Regina B. Jensen, Ph.D., Editor: Space of Love Magazine

Originally written for students at St. Thomas' Hospital in London, this guide to child development offers an overview of child development for parents, teachers, and all adults concerned with raising children. Many of the book's ideas come from direct work with children and draw on Rudolf Steiner's approach to child development. The book's chapters are: (1) "Outer Aspects of Child Development Considered as a Whole"; (2) "The Child from Birth to Three"; (3) "The Child between Three and Six"; (4) "Temperament and Personality"; (5) "Children from Seven to Ten"; (6) "The Years from Eleven to Fifteen"; (7) "The First Adventure into Adult Life--Young People between Sixteen and Twenty"; and (8) "Epilogue: Threshold of Adult Life--21." Contains 92 references and a list of suggested further reading. (EV)