Early Childhood Development Books

The Irreducible Needs of Children: What Every Child Must Have to Grow, Learn, and Flourish
by T. Berry, M.D. Brazelton, Stanley I. Greenspan, M.D.

Pediatrician Brazelton (Touchpoints) and child psychiatrist Greenspan (Building Healthy Minds) join together to present a hard-hitting treatise on what children really need from their parents and from society. While the text is densely written, it is engaging. The two childcare experts share the mutually strong conviction that society is not currently meeting the basic needs of children. Each chapter is devoted to the discussion of an "irreducible" need, such as the Need for Ongoing Nurturing Relationships, the Need for Physical Protection, Safety and Regulation, the Need for Stable Supportive Communities and Cultural Continuity, and the Need to Protect the Future. After each discussion, the authors recommend ways to meet these needs. For instance, Brazelton and Greenspan examine how day care shortchanges children in America and make detailed recommendations on what is needed to improve the situation, such as better training, higher wages and continuity of care. Also powerful are their comments on educational issues and the need for an expanded role by schools and healthcare systems. Policy makers, health-care professionals, educators and parents will find this a thought-provoking but demanding read that poses incisive questions about the way we raise, educate and care for our children. Brazelton and Greenspan offer viable, intelligent solutions to a full deck of problems faced by our country as well as by the global community. (Oct.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

The Developing Mind:
How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are
Daniel J. Siegel
Guilford, 1999

This book goes beyond the nature-nurture divisions that traditionally have constrained much of our thinking about development, exploring the role of interpersonal relationships in forging key connections in the brain. Daniel J. Siegel presents a groundbreaking new way of thinking about the emergence of the human mind - the process by which each of us becomes a feeling, thinking, remembering individual. Illuminating how and why neurobiology matters, this book is essential reading for clinicians, educators, researchers, and students interested in human experience and development across the life span.

The Emotional Life of the Toddler
by Alicia F. Lieberman

Any parent who has followed an active toddler around for a day knows that a child of this age is a whirlwind of explosive, contradictory, and ever-changing emotions.

Many books cover the physical and cognitive abilities of the toddler, but Lieberman's is the first to offer an in-depth examination of the varied and intense emotional life of children from ages one to three.

Drawing on her lifelong research, Dr. Lieberman addresses commonly asked questions and issues. Why, for example, is "no" often the favorite response of the toddler? How should parents deal with the anger they sometimes feel in the face of their toddler's unflagging obstinacy? Why does a crying toddler run to his mother for a hug only to push himself vigorously away as soon as she begins to embrace him? With the help of numerous examples and vivid cases, Lieberman answers these and other questions, giving us, in the process, a rich, insightful profile of the roller coaster emotional world of the toddler.

Lieberman shows that the toddler is torn between the strong desire to remain close to the parent and the equally compelling drive to explore new and exciting surroundings. The author discusses how a child can be helped to achieve a balance between these conflicting desires, to feel both confident and outgoing as well as protected and comforted when necessary.

Lieberman also provides fascinating new material on how children's different temperaments express themselves during the toddler years and how parents can better match their own temperaments to their child's. Particular attention is given to the shy child and the very active child at this age. In addition, Lieberman gives new Insights on how best to handle common toddler problems, such as sleep disturbances, sibling rivalry, and temper tantrums.

She also provides invaluable information on the normal anxieties of this age and how to recognize when anxiety is excessive, needing special attention. Finally, she gives us a fresh, insightful picture of how toddlers typically handle the stress of their parents divorce and outside child care, and provide sensitive practical advice on easing the toddle through these transitions.

The Emotional Life of the Toddler is an in valuable resource for parents, clinicians, researchers, and child-care workers alike.

Healing Trauma
Attachment, Mind, Body and Brain
edited by Marion F. Solomon and Daniel J. Siegel
Norton, 2003

Healing Trauma provides readers with a broad, but detailed, framework in which to understand, evaluate, and treat trauma and traumatic attachments. In this book, Daniel Siegel and Marion Solomon have gathered together the work of the foremost researchers, clinicians, and theoreticians working within this new paradigm of trauma treatment to present a comprehensive discussion of trauma and healing, one that involves biological, developmental, and social components.

Each of the eight chapters in this book provides up-to-date information on the research, clinical practice, and theory of trauma. The first four chapters form a conceptual unit with a focus on the developmental origins of the factors that have been determined to place individuals at risk for suffering long-term sequalae of trauma. Beginning with Daniel Siegel's chapter describing the implications of interpersonal neurobiology for developmental theory, these chapters pay particular attention to the attachment relationship and propose how the nature of that critical bond forms the basis for resilience or vulnerability. In this vein, Erik Hesse, Mary Main, Kelley Yost Adrams, and Anne Rifkin explore the "second generation" effects of trauma while Allan Schore considers the connection between early relational trauma in children and the formation of disorganized attachments. Bessel van der Kolk's chapter considering the correct implications of the theory of PTSD concludes this conceptual unit.

The second four chapters draw upon the resources from developmental research and theory outlined in chapter 1 through 4, and go on to consider various and complementary approaches to treatment. Francine Shapiro and Louise Maxfield develop the effective EMDR model of treatment with a specific emphasis on its application to patients with suboptimal attachment relations. In subsequent chapters, Diana Fosha outlines and provides rich case examples of accelerated experiential-dynamic psychotherapy (AEDP) and Robert Neborsky describes his work with short-term intensive dynamic psychotherapy in which defense mechanism (often arising from suboptimal attachment) are revealed and reprocessed. Marion Solomon provides the final chapter in which she exhibits a model for couples therapy premised on the repair of disrupted attachment relations at both a neurobiological and social level.

Emerging from the integration of developmental, neurobiological and social perspectives, Healing Trauma provides a collection of essays that will be accessible to a wide variety of practitioners in the medical and psychological healing professions.

Parenting from the Inside Out
How a Deeper Self-Understanding Can Help You Raise Children Who Thrive
Daniel J. Siegel, M.D., and Mary Hartzell, M. Ed
Jeremy P Tarcher, 2003

A child psychiatrist and an early childhood expert reveal that the first step in raising happy and healthy children is to fully understand and learn from your own childhood experiences.

How many parents have found themselves thinking: I can't believe I just said to my child the very thing my parents used to say to me! Am I just destined to repeat the mistakes of my parents? In Parenting from the Inside Out, child psychiatrist Daniel J. Siegel and early childhood expert Mary Hartzell explore the extent to which our childhood experiences shape the way that we parent. Drawing on stunning new findings in neurobiology and attachment research, they explain how interpersonal relationships directly affect the development of the brain, and offer parents a step-by-step approach to forming a deeper understanding of their own life stories that will help them raise compassionate and resilient children.

The Working Poor : Invisible in America
by DAVID K. SHIPLER

This guided and very personal tour through the lives of the working poor shatters the myth that America is a country in which prosperity and security are the inevitable rewards of gainful employment. Armed with an encyclopedic collection of artfully deployed statistics and individual stories, Shipler, former New York Times reporter and Pulitzer winner for Arab and Jew, identifies and describes the interconnecting obstacles that keep poor workers and those trying to enter the work force after a lifetime on welfare from achieving economic stability. This America is populated by people of all races and ethnicities, whose lives, Shipler effectively shows, are Sisyphean, and that includes the teachers and other professionals who deal with the realities facing the working poor. Dr. Barry Zuckerman, a Boston pediatrician, discovers that landlords do nothing when he calls to tell them that unsafe housing is a factor in his young patients' illnesses; he adds lawyers to his staff, and they get a better response. In seeking out those who employ subsistence wage earners, such as garment-industry shop owners and farmers, Shipler identifies the holes in the social safety net. "The system needs to be straightened out," says one worker who, in 1999, was making $6.80 an hour80 cents more than when she started factory work in 1970. "They need more resources to be able to help these people who are trying to help themselves." Attention needs to be paid, because Shipler's subjects are too busy working for substandard wages to call attention to themselves. They do not, he writes, "have the luxury of rage."