How much change is possible over a lifetime and across generations? What is realistic in what we can do to promote healthy human development in our world? A group of leading international scholars in the fields of psychology and psychiatry, economics, and sociology address these important questions. Contributions cover marriage, divorce, and "living together"; poverty or economic disadvantage; and psychological traits and health, and how these affect parents and their children. Each section also has a chapter on interventions to improve lives.
Contents
Part I. Introduction and Overview: 1. Human development across lives and generations: the potential for change; 2. Life-course development: the interplay of social-selection and social causations within and across generations; Part II. Human Capital: 3. An overview of economic and social opportunities and disadvantage in European households; 4. Parental, childhood, and early adult legacies in the emergence of adult social exclusion: evidence on what matters from a British cohort; 5. Individual and parent based intervention strategies for promoting human capital and positive behavior; Part III. Partnership Behavior: 6. Cohabitation and divorce across nations and generations; 7. The intergenerational transmission of couple instability; 8. Strengthening partnerships and families; Part IV. Psychological Health and Development: 9. Intergenerational continuities and discontinuities in psychological problems; 10. Discontinuity and stability of iq's: the French adoption studies; 11. What do we know about children's development from theory, intervention, and policy?; Part V. Conclusion: 12. Human development and the potential for change from the perspective of multiple disciplines: what have we learned?
Review
"A new look at the nature-nurture issue, presenting it as an integrated system in which there is interaction and interdependence and in which causality is almost never linear or caused by only one factor....A very powerful example of the need for professionals to be conversant in and with other disciplines...bringing together the fields of economics, demography, sociology, psychology, and psychiatry....An extraordinary volume that deals with fundamental questions about human development" Contemporary Psychology
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