Are there certain periods in a child′s development when he or she may be more sensitive to specific environmental influences than at earlier or later times? Are preschool teachers equally nurturant to securely attached versus insecurely attached children? Are girls more sensitive than boys to parental maltreatment? Designed to synthesize what we know about the nature of environmental influences (nurture) upon development, Wachs artfully explores whether development depends upon a sole factor--the rearing environment, genetics, nutrition, or individual characteristics-- or, whether the degree of directional consistency combined with the extent of covariance among these factors may have the most developmental impact. Issues such as how individuals respond differently to stress, medical treatment, parenting styles, teaching approaches and daycare centers are all discussed through careful analysis of research and theories from a variety of fields. Researchers, teachers, and intervention specialists of developmental psychology, family studies, social psychology, education, and nursing will find The Nature of Nurture an inspiration to further examine how environmental systems determine variability in developmental outcomes and what can be done to promote optimal outcomes for individual children. USE IN NEXT AD (2/1/94): "In The Nature of Nurture Wachs does precisely what he intends to do. He lays out clearly and thoroughly what we know and do not know about environmental influences on human development, and he builds on the conceptual and empirical work of others to move research on environmental effects forward in productive and exciting ways. . . . [It] should serve as a bible for future research on the environment and development. As such, it is a must read for developmental psychologists from all specialty areas, to graduate students, and to upper level undergraduates. This is an eminently readable and important book." --Contemporary Psychology "The Nature of Nurture provides a thorough and thoughtful review and analysis of state-of-the-art theory, concepts, and evidence pertaining to the effect of the environment on human development. Especially important is the attention the author pays to the multidimensional nature of the environment, to individual differences among children, and to the need to consider both of these domains of complexity for understanding the development of specific aspects of psychological and behavioral functioning." --Jay Belsky, The Pennsylvania State University "The Nature of Nurture provides extended treatments of issues rarely dealt with in detail, including organism-environment covariance and organism-environment interaction. All in all, this is an excellent choice for those interested in studying complex, dynamic interplay of organism and environment. It deals with a number of critical design and theory issues; and it ends with a hybrid ecological developmental model designed to integrate studies of experience and offers a useful discussion of future trends in an emerging area of developmental studies." --Child Development Abstracts & Bibliography

Using evidence from a broad array of scientific fields (including biology, psychology, and economics), this book provides cutting-edge information about the flexibility of genetic expression that derives from the interplay of genes with environments from

From Michael Gurian, the best-selling author of The Minds of Boys and The Wonder of Girls, comes the next-step book that shows how any parent can tune into a child’s unique core personality, hard wiring, temperament, and genetic predisposition in order to help that child flourish and thrive. Based on the most recent brain research, Nurture the Nature features the Ten Tips for Nurturing the Nature of Your Baby, self-tests, checklists, and many other tools for you to help your kids get exactly the kind of support they need, from infants to adolescents. While offering positive ideas for nurturing your child, Gurian also shows how to avoid the stress, pressures, and excessive competition of what he identifies as social trends parenting. Most parents know instinctively that their child is unique and has special potential, weaknesses, and strengths. No child is a blank slate. Gurian calls on parents to turn away from one-size-fits-all approaches and instead support the individual core nature of a child with effective and customized loving care.

How we raise young children is one of today's most highly personalized and sharply politicized issues, in part because each of us can claim some level of "expertise." The debate has intensified as discoveries about our development-in the womb and in the first months and years-have reached the popular media. How can we use our burgeoning knowledge to assure the well-being of all young children, for their own sake as well as for the sake of our nation? Drawing from new findings, this book presents important conclusions about nature-versus-nurture, the impact of being born into a working family, the effect of politics on programs for children, the costs and benefits of intervention, and other issues. The committee issues a series of challenges to decision makers regarding the quality of child care, issues of racial and ethnic diversity, the integration of children's cognitive and emotional development, and more. Authoritative yet accessible, From Neurons to Neighborhoods presents the evidence about "brain wiring" and how kids learn to speak, think, and regulate their behavior. It examines the effect of the climate-family, child care, community-within which the child grows.

The Exposome: A Primer is the first book dedicated to exposomics, detailing the purpose and scope of this emerging field of study, its practical applications and how it complements a broad range of disciplines. Genetic causes account for up to a third of all complex diseases. (As genomic approaches improve, this is likely to rise.) Environmental factors also influence human disease but, unlike with genetics, there is no standard or systematic way to measure the influence of environmental exposures. The exposome is an emerging concept that hopes to address this, measuring the effects of life-long environmental exposures on health and how these exposures can influence disease. This systematic introduction considers topics of managing and integrating exposome data (including maps, models, computation, and systems biology), "-omics"-based technologies, and more. Both students and scientists in disciplines including toxicology, environmental health, epidemiology, and public health will benefit from this rigorous yet readable overview.

In this powerful critique, the esteemed historian and philosopher of science Evelyn Fox Keller addresses the nature-nurture debates, including the persistent disputes regarding the roles played by genes and the environment in determining individual traits and behavior. Keller is interested in both how an oppositional “versus” came to be inserted between nature and nurture, and how the distinction on which that opposition depends, the idea that nature and nurture are separable, came to be taken for granted. How, she asks, did the illusion of a space between nature and nurture become entrenched in our thinking, and why is it so tenacious? Keller reveals that the assumption that the influences of nature and nurture can be separated is neither timeless nor universal, but rather a notion that emerged in Anglo-American culture in the late nineteenth century. She shows that the seemingly clear-cut nature-nurture debate is riddled with incoherence. It encompasses many disparate questions knitted together into an indissoluble tangle, and it is marked by a chronic ambiguity in language. There is little consensus about the meanings of terms such as nature, nurture, gene, and environment. Keller suggests that contemporary genetics can provide a more appropriate, precise, and useful vocabulary, one that might help put an end to the confusion surrounding the nature-nurture controversy.

The notion that maternal care and love will determine a child’s emotional well-being and future personality has become ubiquitous. In countless stories and movies we find that the problems of the protagonists—anything from the fear of romantic commitment to serial killing—stem from their troubled relationships with their mothers during childhood. How did we come to hold these views about the determinant power of mother love over an individual’s emotional development? And what does this vision of mother love entail for children and mothers? In The Nature and Nurture of Love, Marga Vicedo examines scientific views about children’s emotional needs and mother love from World War II until the 1970s, paying particular attention to John Bowlby’s ethological theory of attachment behavior. Vicedo tracks the development of Bowlby’s work as well as the interdisciplinary research that he used to support his theory, including Konrad Lorenz’s studies of imprinting in geese, Harry Harlow’s experiments with monkeys, and Mary Ainsworth’s observations of children and mothers in Uganda and the United States. Vicedo’s historical analysis reveals that important psychoanalysts and animal researchers opposed the project of turning emotions into biological instincts. Despite those substantial criticisms, she argues that attachment theory was paramount in turning mother love into a biological need. This shift introduced a new justification for the prescriptive role of biology in human affairs and had profound—and negative—consequences for mothers and for the valuation of mother love.