Infants and Children: Prenatal Through Middle Childhood (8th Edition)

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Book Description

Its clear and engaging writing style, exceptional multicultural and cross-cultural focus, rich examples, and long-standing commitment to presenting the most up-to-date scholarship while also offering students research-based, practical applications that they can relate to their personal and professional lives have made Berk and Meyers' Infants and Children: Prenatal Through Middle Childhood a best-selling, chronologically organized child development text that is relied on in classrooms worldwide. The writers present development in the physical, cognitive, emotional, and social domains using an integrated approach. They place an emphasis on the intricate interactions that exist between genetics and environment, and they pay special attention to culture.

Laura Berk, a well-known academic, researcher, and author, now has a new coauthor by her side in the form of Adena Meyers. They are both faculty members in the Department of Psychology at Illinois State University, and they have worked together on a number of projects in the past. Because they each have their own unique areas of expertise and a tremendous amount of experience, they make an excellent team for coauthoring this new edition. They share with the students, in an approachable and pertinent manner, the most recent theories and discoveries that have been made in the subject. The signature story-like and conversational style of Berk and Meyers invites students to actively learn alongside the text's “characters,” who experience real issues in development, including physical, cognitive, and peer challenges, as well as parenting and educational concerns. These “characters” are presented in a way that makes it feel as though they are having a conversation with the reader. Both Berk and Meyers assist students in connecting what they are learning in the classroom to their personal and professional interests. They do this by speaking directly to students about challenges they will face in their future endeavors as parents, educators, health care providers, social workers, and researchers. Students, in their capacity as members of a human community that is both global and diverse, are expected to demonstrate an informed attitude to the responsibility of comprehending the needs and concerns of children and providing appropriate responses to those wants and concerns.

The writers give old and emerging theories in a particularly clear and engaging writing style, along with a myriad of research-based, real-world, cross-cultural, and multicultural examples. This is done while carefully considering the complexity of child development. The significant revision done for this edition brings forth the most recent scholarship, representing the evolving field of child development. This revision helps strengthen the linkages between developmental domains as well as between theory and research with applications.