The Youngest Minds: Parenting and Genes in the Development of Intellect and Emotion - Hardcover

Barnet, Ann B.; Barnet, Richard J.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0684815370 ISBN 13: 9780684815374

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, 1998

Synopsis

Drawing on insights from recent advances in neuroscience and psychological research, The Youngest Minds offers a new look at how children learn language, establish emotional ties, gain control of their own emotions, and embrace moral values. The authors discuss recent research and theory about the effects of early experience on the physiology of the brain. They show how a child's genetic inheritance and experiences interact at many different levels. The capacities for language, emotional development, and moral understanding are inborn, but they are fine-tuned by human relationships that influence the landscape of the brain. The Youngest Minds explains how parents and other caregivers support the intertwined processes of language, intellectual, and emotional development with the experiences they provide for a baby. Through daily interactions, infants establish ways of responding that will influence them all their lives. The preschool years are critical in the lives of children because their brains are developing more rapidly than at any other time in life. In these years, children are especially dependent on parents and other primary caregivers to meet their needs for love, security, stimulation, and challenge. The Barnets describe how children learn to control their anger, consider the feelings of others, assimilate the standards of acceptable behavior in their family and culture, and develop moral sensibilities. Using studies that follow groups of children over many years, the authors explain how an accumulation of risks in early years can lead to serious trouble in adult life. But they also present research demonstrating that many children overcome great odds. The Youngest Minds outlines the essential characteristics of a good caregiving environment. Whether a child is cared for at home or at a day care center, certain conditions need to be met. Because of many changes in our society over the last few decades, families are finding it harder to provide the unstressful but challenging environment that much scientific evidence indicates babies need. The authors conclude with a look at who is taking care of America's young children and offer some ideas for improving the quality of their care.

About this title

Review

Daniel Goleman author of Emotional Intelligence Every parent, educator, and politician should read The Youngest Minds.

Jonathan Kozol The Youngest Minds is brilliant and complex but stunningly accessible and terribly important; the Barnets have created something elegantly moral, wise, and beautiful.

From the Back Cover

Revealing what every parent needs to know about what goes on in a child's brain during the critical first months and years of life, Ann B. Barnet, M.D., and Richard J. Barnet explore children's genetic tendencies toward anger, fear, and other emotions. Showing how interactions with other people can actually organize and reorganize a child's brain, they offer invaluable guidance to parents and caregivers by describing the essential characteristics of healthy parent-child relationships and good child care, as well as how the effects of bad early experiences can be overcome later in life.

An unprecedented, up-to-the-minute look at the way human relationships and genetics shape the personalities and destinies of children, The Youngest Minds reveals more clearly than ever before how parents, for better or worse, become partners in the development of their child's mind.

About this edition

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0684815370
• ISBN 13: 9780684815374
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 352