This tutorial textbook on child psychology includes chapters by academics in research areas as diverse as evolutionary and cross-cultural psychology, behavioural genetics, social cognition, and media influence on child behaviour.

Children's emerging communication and social skills.

The Child as Social Person provides an integrated overview of the exciting field of developmental social psychology, and as such will be essential reading for advanced undergraduate students in psychology, education and social work.

Research in the field of human social development is moving at an astonishing pace. Within psychology, children's social behaviour has attracted interest from cognitive, social, clinical, and educational psychologists employing a wide variety of techniques that range from conversational analysis to experimental designs. Contributions have also come from beyond the domain of traditional psychology such as evolutionary theorists, behaviour geneticists, cultural anthropologists, and ethologists. This book aims to bring the reader to the cutting edge of this work by including original contributions from those in the very forefront of their discipline. Each contributor has spent years working in their specialist area and the authors have been given the freedom to argue for very different positions on the origins and sequence of children's social competence. The Social Child brings together controversial and sometimes conflicting positions on issues of central importance to society. It considers the likely impact of rising divorce rates and single parenting, how media images affect children's understanding and behaviour, how genes inform development, the role parents have, whether changing sex roles have had an impact on children's social interactions, and the sources from which children acquire behaviour. This book will be relevant to those interested in children's behaviour both professionally (social workers, teachers, educational psychologists, therapists, youth workers) and academically. It can also be used as a textbook for second and third year undergraduates and by postgraduates.

When does our acknowledgment of the social contract really begin? When do young children first display an understanding of their social world? When and why do they begin to grasp that other people have feelings and thoughts like their own, yet different? In this pathbreaking work Judy Dunn explores several aspects of the early process of social discovery: children's recognition of the feelings of others, their ability to interpret and anticipate the behavior and relationships of others, and their comprehension of the prohibitions and accepted practices of their world. Dunn's work brings into focus an apparent paradox in our current view of the very young child's social understanding. Whereas research on infancy reveals that babies are born with a predisposition to learn about other people, and appear sensitive to the emotions and behavior of others, experimental studies suggest that children of three, four, and five years of age have difficulty gauging the feelings, intentions, and perceptions of others. Why should this social intelligence--which might be expected to be high on the developmental agenda--proceed so slowly? Is the social understanding of young children really so limited? Dunn pursues answers to these questions through close observation of children in their homes, in the complex social world of the family; her findings suggest a sophistication that has not yet been appreciated or documented. The Beginnings of Social Understanding draws upon observations and analyses from three longitudinal studies of children during the transition from infancy to childhood, examining children's disputes, jokes, play, their questions and narratives about others. The book demonstrates children's increasing subtlety as members of a cultural world, and argues that emotional relationships and family discourse play crucial roles in the development of this understanding. Dunn breaks through traditional notions of child development as she sets forth a refreshingly original perspective from which to view the social potential of children.