[Ebook PDF] Child Development: A Cultural Approach, 2nd Edition

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[Ebook PDF] Child Development: A Cultural Approach, 2nd Edition

Authors: Jensen Arnett Jeffery (Author), Maynard Ashley (Author)

Help students understand how culture impacts development — and why it matters
Child Development: A Cultural Approach helps students learn how to think culturally about human development throughout our diverse, increasingly globalized world. Authors Jeffrey Arnett and Ashley Maynard weave an engaging chronological narrative that traces development from birth through emerging adulthood, integrating current research and cross-cultural examples from around the globe throughout. The Second Edition offers substantially updated content, as well as new coverage of key educational issues, to help students achieve a thorough, practical understanding of development throughout the world.

PREFACE
Welcome to Child Development: A Cultural Approach. For us, the most important motivation in writing this book was that we wanted to provide students with a portrayal of development that would cover the whole amazing range of human cultural diversity. As professors who have taught human development courses for years and were familiar with the available textbooks, we were struck by how narrow all of them seemed to be.
They focused on human development in the United States as if it were the typical pattern for people everywhere, with only the occasional mention of people in other parts of the world. If you knew nothing about human development except what you read in a standard textbook, you would conclude that 95 percent of the human population must reside in the United States. Yet the United States is actually less than 5 percent of the world’s population, and there is an immense range of patterns of human development in cultures around the globe, with most of those patterns strikingly different than the mainstream U.S. model. And, even within the United States, cultural diversity is much greater than what is found in the typical textbook.
So, in writing, we decided to take a cultural approach. We set out to portray child development as it takes place across all the different varieties of cultural patterns that people have devised in response to their local conditions and the creative inspiration of their imaginations. Our goal was to teach students to think culturally, so that when they apply child development to the work they do or to their own lives, they understand that there is, always and everywhere, a cultural basis to development. The cultural approach also includes learning how to critique research for the extent to which it does or does not take the cultural basis of development into account. We provide this kind of critique at numerous points throughout the book, with the intent that students will learn how to do it themselves by the time they reach the end.
We know from our experience as teachers that students find it fascinating to learn about the different forms that child development takes in various cultures, but there are also practical benefits to the cultural approach. It is more important than ever for students to have knowledge of the wider world because of the increasingly globalized economy and because so many problems, such as terrorism and climate change, cross borders. Whether they travel the globe or remain in their hometowns, in a culturally diverse and globalized world, students will benefit from being able to apply the cultural approach and think culturally about development, whether in social interactions with friends and neighbors, or in their careers because they may have patients, students, or coworkers who come from different cultures.
The Chinese have an expression that loosely translates as “the frog in the well knows not of the great ocean,” and it is often used as a cautionary reminder to look beyond our own experience and not to assume that what is true for ourselves is true for everyone else as well. We think all of us are like that frog, in a way (which is, in case you were wondering, why a frog is featured on the cover of this book). We’ve grown up in a certain cultural context. We’ve learned to think about life in a certain way. We’ve learned to think about development in a certain way. And most of us don’t realize how broad and diverse our world really.
is. Our hope is that this book will help more students lift themselves out of the well and appreciate the wonderful diversity of child development.
The cultural approach makes this textbook much different from other child development textbooks, but there are other features that make this textbook distinct. This is the only major textbook to include a separate chapter on toddlerhood, the second and third years of life. Jeff had always been puzzled by the way other textbooks gloss over toddlerhood, usually including the second year of life as part of “infancy” and the third year of life as part of “early childhood.” Yet any parent knows that years 2 and 3 are a lot different from what comes before or after, and Jeff remembered this well from his own experience as a father of twins. Infants cannot walk or talk, and once toddlers learn to do both in years 2 and 3, their experience of life—and their parents’ experiences—change utterly. Toddlers are also different from older children, in that their ability for emotional self-regulation and their awareness of what is and is not acceptable behavior in their culture is much more limited.
This textbook is also set apart among major textbooks in that it includes an entire chapter on the stage of emerging adulthood. Emerging adulthood, roughly ages 18 to 25, is a new life stage that has arisen in developed countries over the past 50 years, as people have entered later into the commitments that structure adult life in most cultures: marriage, parenthood, and stable work. Jeff originally proposed the theory of emerging adulthood in 2000, and it has now become widely used in the social sciences. We think it is a fascinating and dynamic time of life, and we know students enjoy learning about it because many of them are in that life stage or about to enter it.