Child and adolescent development

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Jack Wingfield, Angela Wingfield

Examines how and why your body changes as you grow, the differences between boys and girls, how to take care of your appearance, how to survive parties, and how babies are made.

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Deborah L. Tolman

"Be sexy but not sexual. Don't be a prude but don't be a slut. These are the cultural messages that rain down on teenage girls. In movies and magazines, in music and advice columns, girls are portrayed as the object or the victim of someone else's desire - but virtually never as people with acceptable sexual feelings of their own. What teenage girls make of these contradictory messages, and what they make of their awakening sexuality - so distant from and yet so susceptible to cultural stereotypes - emerges for the first time in frank and complex fashion in Deborah Tolman's thoughtful and readable book.". "A look into the world of adolescent sexuality, this book offers an intimate and often disturbing, sometimes inspiring, picture of how teenage girls experience, understand, and respond to their sexual feelings, and of how society mediates, shapes, and distorts this experience. In extensive interviews, we listen as actual adolescent girls - white, black, and Latina, urban and suburban - talk candidly about their curiosity and confusion, their pleasure and disappointment, their fears, defiance, or capitulation in the face of a seemingly imperishable double standard that smiles upon burgeoning sexuality in boys yet frowns, even panics, at its equivalent in girls. Rather than trying to protect girls from sexual threats by denying their sexuality or sexual temptations, Tolman suggests that calmly acknowledging girls' sexual desire as real and normal can be an important way for parents to support their daughters' confidence in making their own decisions and resisting sexual peer pressure.". "Dilemmas of Desire vividly evokes girls' perplexity as they negotiate some of the most vexing issues of adolescence, all the while convinced that they are the only ones with these problems. As a thoughtful, richly informed examination of the dilemmas girls face, this revealing book begins the critical work of understanding the sexuality of young women in all its personal and social significance."--BOOK JACKET.

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Kathy Koch, PH.D

"Technology is one of the benefits of living in today's world. It is a non-negotiable for success in our educational, vocational, and social cultures. Yet, with all the advantages there are inherent dangers, deceptions, and abuses. Teens often look to their digital tools to make them happy, when you set boundaries or take them away they feel frustrated and incomplete. Unhealthy habits formed in this stage of life easily carry over into adulthood and addictions to technology make other addictions more likely. Screens and Teens applauds the good aspects of the digital age, but also alerts parents to how technology contributes to self-centered character, negative behaviors, and beliefs that inhibit spiritual growth, prescribing manageable solutions regardless of the level of their teen's involvement. Unmasking the lies teenagers tend to believe, like "I must have choices," the book majors on truth, acknowledging that Truth alone brings contentment, freedom, and success"--

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David F. Lancy, John Bock, and Suzanne Gaskins

This work offers a large, mural-like portrait of childhood across time, culture, species, and environment. Even a casual reading of the literature on childhood will persuade one that learning is a very important topic that commands the attention of tens of thousands of scholars and practitioners. Yet, anthropological research on children has exerted relatively little influence on this community. This book will change that. The book demonstrates that anthropologists studying childhood can offer a description and theoretically sophisticated account of children's learning and its role in their development, socialization, and enculturation. Further, it demonstrates the particular contribution that children's learning makes to the construction of society and culture as well as the role that culture-acquiring children play in human evolution. Chapters have been contributed in archaeology, primatology, biological and cultural anthropology, and cross-cultural psychology.