Narratives from the Crib

Narratives from the Crib
Author: Katherine Nelson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 372
Release: 2006
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9780674023635

This classic psychological case study focuses on one talkative child's emerging ability to use language, her capacity for understanding, for imagining, and for making inferences and solving problems. In wide-ranging essays, scholars offer multifaceted linguistic and psychological analyses of two-year-old Emily's bedtime conversations with her parents and pre-sleep monologues, taped over a fifteen-month period. In a foreword written for this new edition, Emily, now an adult, reflects on the experience of having been a research subject without knowing it.

Cribsheet

Cribsheet
Author: Emily Oster
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 353
Release: 2020-04-21
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 0525559272

From the author of Expecting Better, The Family Firm, and The Unexpected an economist's guide to the early years of parenting. “Both refreshing and useful. With so many parenting theories driving us all a bit batty, this is the type of book that we need to help calm things down.” —LA Times “The book is jampacked with information, but it’s also a delightful read because Oster is such a good writer.” —NPR With Expecting Better, award-winning economist Emily Oster spotted a need in the pregnancy market for advice that gave women the information they needed to make the best decision for their own pregnancies. By digging into the data, Oster found that much of the conventional pregnancy wisdom was wrong. In Cribsheet, she now tackles an even greater challenge: decision-making in the early years of parenting. As any new parent knows, there is an abundance of often-conflicting advice hurled at you from doctors, family, friends, and strangers on the internet. From the earliest days, parents get the message that they must make certain choices around feeding, sleep, and schedule or all will be lost. There's a rule—or three—for everything. But the benefits of these choices can be overstated, and the trade-offs can be profound. How do you make your own best decision? Armed with the data, Oster finds that the conventional wisdom doesn't always hold up. She debunks myths around breastfeeding (not a panacea), sleep training (not so bad!), potty training (wait until they're ready or possibly bribe with M&Ms), language acquisition (early talkers aren't necessarily geniuses), and many other topics. She also shows parents how to think through freighted questions like if and how to go back to work, how to think about toddler discipline, and how to have a relationship and parent at the same time. Economics is the science of decision-making, and Cribsheet is a thinking parent's guide to the chaos and frequent misinformation of the early years. Emily Oster is a trained expert—and mom of two—who can empower us to make better, less fraught decisions—and stay sane in the years before preschool.

Handbook of Cultural Psychology, First Edition

Handbook of Cultural Psychology, First Edition
Author: Shinobu Kitayama
Publisher: Guilford Press
Total Pages: 913
Release: 2010-01-04
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 1606236555

Bringing together leading authorities, this definitive handbook provides a comprehensive review of the field of cultural psychology. Major theoretical perspectives are explained, and methodological issues and challenges are discussed. The volume examines how topics fundamental to psychology—identity and social relations, the self, cognition, emotion and motivation, and development—are influenced by cultural meanings and practices. It also presents cutting-edge work on the psychological and evolutionary underpinnings of cultural stability and change. In all, more than 60 contributors have written over 30 chapters covering such diverse areas as food, love, religion, intelligence, language, attachment, narratives, and work.

Storylines

Storylines
Author: Elliot G. Mishler
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2009-07-01
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 9780674041134

What do we mean when we refer to our “identity,” and how do we represent it in the stories we tell about our lives? Is “identity” a sustained private core, or does it change as circumstances and relationships shift? In this thoughtful and learned book, a recognized master of research interviewing explores these questions through analyses of in-depth interviews with five craftartists, who reflect on their lives and their efforts to sustain their form of work as committed artists in a world of mass production and standardization. The artists describe their families of origin and the families they have created, and the conscious decisions, chance events, and life experiences that entered into the ways they achieved their adult artistic identities. Exploring these continuities, discontinuities, and unresolvable tensions in an analysis that brings new sophistication to a much-used term, Elliot Mishler suggests that “identity” is always dialogic and relational, a complex of partial subidentities rather than a unitary monad. More a verb than a noun, it reflects an individual’s modes of adaptation, appropriation, and resistance to sociocultural plots and roles. With its critical review of narrative research methods, model of analysis for the systematic study of life stories and identity, and vision of how narrative studies may contribute to theory and research in the social sciences, Storylines is an eloquent and important book for narrative psychology and lifespan development.

Expecting Better

Expecting Better
Author: Emily Oster
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2024-11-12
Genre: Health & Fitness
ISBN: 0593833201

A gift edition, with a new letter to the reader from Emily—perfect for baby showers and special moments “Emily Oster is the non-judgmental girlfriend holding our hand and guiding us through pregnancy and motherhood. She has done the work to get us the hard facts in a soft, understandable way.” —Amy Schumer What to Expect When You're Expecting meets Freakonomics: an award-winning economist and author of Cribsheet, The Family Firm, and The Unexpected disproves standard recommendations about pregnancy to empower women while they're expecting. Pregnancy—unquestionably one of the most pro­found, meaningful experiences of adulthood—can reduce otherwise intelligent women to, well, babies. Pregnant women are told to avoid cold cuts, sushi, alcohol, and coffee without ever being told why these are forbidden. Rules for prenatal testing are similarly unexplained. Moms-to-be desperately want a resource that empowers them to make their own right choices. When award-winning economist Emily Oster was a mom-to-be herself, she evaluated the data behind the accepted rules of pregnancy, and discovered that most are often misguided and some are just flat-out wrong. Debunking myths and explaining everything from the real effects of caffeine to the surprising dangers of gardening, Expecting Better is the book for every pregnant woman who wants to enjoy a healthy and relaxed pregnancy—and the occasional glass of wine.

Love's Story Told

Love's Story Told
Author: Forrest Glen Robinson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 508
Release: 1992
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9780674539280

Searching out the private man as well as the public figure, this elegantly written biography follows Henry Murray through his discoveries and triumphs as a pioneer in the field of clinical psychology, as a co-founder of Harvard's Psychological Clinic, the co-inventor of the Thematic Apperception Test, and a biographer of Herman Melville. Murray's fascination with Melville's troubled genius, his wartime experiences in the O.S.S., and his close friendships with Lewis Mumford and Conrad Aiken all come to the fore in this masterly reconstruction of a life. And always, at the heart of this story, Robinson finds Murray's highly erotic and mystical relationship with Christiana Morgan. Love's Story Told penetrates to the heart of a brilliant figure in American intellectual life at mid-century, as he dives deeply into the unconscious, testing in work and love the limits of self-exploration.

Narrative Analysis

Narrative Analysis
Author: Colette Daiute
Publisher: SAGE
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2004
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0761927980

Narrative Analysis is organized around three approaches or "readings." Literary Readings focus on aesthetic, metaphorical, and other literary qualities inherent to narrative approaches. Social-Relational Readings build upon the idea that narrative discourse is personal but also echoes political, economic, and other material relationships in the environment. Readings through the Force of History explain how narrators come to know themselves and their worlds in terms of and in spite of the received explanations of time and place. Working in a range of ethnic, geographic, generational, class, and institutional communities, the authors demonstrate how they have used narrative inquiry to explore development in challenging social contexts.

Young Minds in Social Worlds

Young Minds in Social Worlds
Author: Katherine Nelson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2010-03-30
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0674041402

Katherine Nelson re-centers developmental psychology with a revived emphasis on development and change, rather than foundations and continuity. She argues that children be seen not as scientists but as members of a community of minds, striving not only to make sense, but also to share meanings with others. A child is always part of a social world, yet the child's experience is private. So, Nelson argues, we must study children in the context of the relationships, interactive language, and culture of their everyday lives. Nelson draws philosophically from pragmatism and phenomenology, and empirically from a range of developmental research. Skeptical of work that focuses on presumed innate abilities and the close fit of child and adult forms of cognition, her dynamic framework takes into account whole systems developing over time, presenting a coherent account of social, cognitive, and linguistic development in the first five years of life. Nelson argues that a child's entrance into the community of minds is a slow, gradual process with enormous consequences for child development, and the adults that they become. Original, deeply scholarly, and trenchant, Young Minds in Social Worlds will inspire a new generation of developmental psychologists.

The Caring Child

The Caring Child
Author: Nancy Eisenberg
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 214
Release: 1992
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9780674097261

The Caring Child provides the most current account of our understanding of the motivations behind prosocial behaviors and how these motives develop and are elicited. Eisenberg broadens our concept of the moral potential of children and shifts the focus from censoring antisocial behaviors to the active promotion of kindness and caring in children.

The Psychology of Childbirth

The Psychology of Childbirth
Author: Aidan Macfarlane
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 158
Release: 1977
Genre: Family & Relationships
ISBN: 9780674721067

The physical process of birth is no longer as mysterious as it once was. But many unanswered psychological questions still surround the birth of a child. In this remarkably appealing and personable book, pediatrician Aidan Macfarlane takes a careful look at a large number of these important psychological unknowns. On Macfarlane's agenda: Can a woman's emotional attitude toward pregnancy cause "morning sickness," influence the smoothness of labor and delivery, or shape the child's behavior after birth? Can the mother-child relationship be adversely affected by separation immediately after birth? Is the quality of the birth experience improved by home delivery? What are the psychological effects of pain-killing drugs on mother and child? What, if anything, does the unborn infant see, hear, and feel inside the womb? Is birth a psychological trauma for the child and, if so, how can it be alleviated? Although Dr. Macfarlane refuses to provide easy answers to any of these questions, his clear discussion of the available evidence is not without important consequences for the way in which we understand birth and manage it in our society.