* Selected as One of the Best Books of the 21st Century by The New York Times * * WINNER of the National Book Critics Circle Award * Books for a Better Life Award * The New York Times Book Review ’s 10 Best Books of the Year * This masterpiece by the National Book Award–winning author of The Noonday Demon features stories of parents who not only learn to deal with their exceptional children, but also find profound meaning in doing so—“a brave, beautiful book that will expand your humanity” ( People ). Solomon’s startling proposition in Far from the Tree is that being exceptional is at the core of the human condition—that difference is what unites us. He writes about families coping with deafness, dwarfism, Down syndrome, autism, schizophrenia, or multiple severe disabilities; with children who are prodigies, who are conceived in rape, who become criminals, who are transgender. While each of these characteristics is potentially isolating, the experience of difference within families is universal, and Solomon documents triumphs of love over prejudice in every chapter. All parenting turns on a crucial question: to what extent should parents accept their children for who they are, and to what extent they should help them become their best selves. Drawing on ten years of research and interviews with more than three hundred families, Solomon mines the eloquence of ordinary people facing extreme challenges. Elegantly reported by a spectacularly original and compassionate thinker, Far from the Tree explores how people who love each other must struggle to accept each other—a theme in every family’s life.

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.

In this book, the author presents a new vision of learning through design and production, and describes computer programming as a source of a learning and design power. As means of studying this extended notion of children's programming, the author implemented Instructional Software Design Projects to explore the learning that takes place when students develop complete mathematical software products designed for other students in their school. The results demonstrate that the young designers learned not only about mathematics (fractions) and programming (Logo), but also about design and user interfaces, as well as representational, pedagogical, and communicational issues.

Dr. Elkind's examination of the child over small periods of time reveals patterns of growth and development of children. This "user-friendly" resources conveys an understanding of children that parents and teachers alike can use in their interactions with young people.

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)