Child Development: Strong Contributions

Reviews the books, The Developing Person by Kathleen Stassen Berger (1980); and The Child: Development Through Adolescence by Bernadine Chuck Fong and Miriam Roher Resnick (1980). These two new child development textbooks are refreshingly strong contributions in their respective domains. The Fong and Resnick volume is directed primarily at freshmen and sophmores who are interested in applied child development for careers in teaching, child care, nursing, and the like. The authors describe children vividly with an accuracy informed by research findings and ideas from theory. The Berger book is more scholarly and based more directly on research without being uninteresting. It is directed toward psychology majors and other students whose interests include developmental research and theory. The quality of both of these textbooks is high. The Berger text gets the highest marks for a psychology course. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved)