It was almost by accident that I became who I turned out to be as a professional, a developmental scientist interested in how early-life experiences shape who we become. Had someone asked me when I graduated from high school what were the chances of me becoming a scientist and teacher, I would have answered “zero, zero”! During my now 40+ year academic career I've come to appreciate how complex the many forces are that shape who we become. There's no nature without nurture and no nurture without nature. This emergent realization led me to learn about and study many aspects of developmental experience, like parenting and peer relations, and the role of genetics and evolution.
I wrote...
The Origins of You: How Childhood Shapes Later Life
Few books share the results of research that follows children—and their experiences, their biology, and their health--from very early in life until middle age while being positioned to illuminate effects of nature and nurture on child, adolescent, and adult development. Origins of You shares such findings from the world-famous Dunedin (NZ) Multidisciplinary Study of Health and Human Development, as well as the American NICHD Study of Early Childhood and Youth Development. Discover how early temperament predicts future functioning, the genetics of smoking, epigenetics and health—and so much more, all in a highly accessible format whereby the reader can pick and choose among numerous topics of personal interest.
This book tells the story of the ground-breaking Minnesota Longitudinal Study, the first to document developmental effects of infant-mother attachment security/insecurity and so much more, a contribution to understanding that greatly shaped my own career.
The book shares discoveries which emerged in following more than 200 children growing up under high-risk conditions from birth to adulthood. In so doing it illuminates whether, how, and why early-life experiences foster problematic development or resilience in the face of adversity.
The definitive work on a groundbreaking study, this essential volume provides a coherent picture of the complexity of development from birth to adulthood. Explicated are both the methodology of the Minnesota study and its far-reaching contributions to understanding how we become who we are. The book marshals a vast body of data on the ways in which individuals' strengths and vulnerabilities are shaped by myriad influences, including early experiences, family and peer relationships throughout childhood and adolescence, variations in child characteristics and abilities, and socioeconomic conditions. Implications for clinical intervention and prevention are also addressed. Rigorously documented and clearly presented,…
How parenting—and other factors—shape infant-parent attachment security/insecurity and the effects of attachment on child, adolescent, and adult development has been the subject of extensive study for more than 4 decades.
This edited volume takes stock of what developmental scholars have learned as well as what challenges to attachment theory and research remain to be addressed. The contributors to this edited volume are all well-recognized experts in the field.
The ongoing growth of attachment research has given rise to new perspectives on classic theoretical questions as well as fruitful new debates. This unique book identifies nine central questions facing the field and invites leading authorities to address them in 46 succinct chapters. Multiple perspectives are presented on what constitutes an attachment relationship, the best ways to measure attachment security, how internal working models operate, the importance of early attachment relationships for later behavior, challenges in cross-cultural research, how attachment-based interventions work, and more. The concluding chapter by the editors delineates points of convergence and divergence among the contributions and…
Whether and how childhood adversity shapes human development is a question that has long intrigued scientists and citizens.
This book tells the story of a great sociologist mining archival data about children who grew up during economically troubled times in America in order to underscore how the past is—and is not—prologue. Perhaps its greatest contribution is in illuminating the environmental conditions and life experiences that determined whether children eventually thrived or failed. In so doing, this work shaped the field of developmental studies, including my own work, for decades to come.
Explores the familial and intergenerational implications and consequences of drastic socio-economic change, as experienced by Oakland, California residents born in 1920-21
This one does not follow children from childhood to adulthood, but rather reveals how 100s of years ago events occurred that radically changed who people interacted with, married and spent their lives relating to.
It is a bold, strikingly original, and epic account of how the co-evolution of psychology and culture created the peculiar Western mind that profoundly shaped the modern world. While Nature matters, what this volume made clear to me is how “big Nurture”, meaning cultural practices, have changed over the past 1,000 years and the dramatic implications of such change for the world we live in today.
'A landmark in social thought. Henrich may go down as the most influential social scientist of the first half of the twenty-first century' MATTHEW SYED
Do you identify yourself by your profession or achievements, rather than your family network? Do you cultivate your unique attributes and goals? If so, perhaps you are WEIRD: raised in a society that is Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic.
Unlike most who have ever lived, WEIRD people are highly individualistic, nonconformist, analytical and control-oriented. How did WEIRD populations become so psychologically peculiar? What part did these differences play in our history, and what do…
Given my interests in nature and nurture, what I find especially fascinating is “the nature of nurture”. By this I mean how Darwinian natural selection has shaped the way our species rears its children and the effects such care has on them.
This book by a world-famous anthropologist beautifully, informative, and insightfully reveals how evolution has made us who we are as parents, people capable of unconditional love but by no means always dispensing it, sometimes the exact opposite—and why that is the case.
I am adopted. For most of my life, I didn’t identify as adopted. I shoved that away because of the shame I felt about being adopted and not truly fitting into my family. But then two things happened: I had my own biological children, the only two people I know to date to whom I am biologically related, and then shortly after my second daughter was born, my older sister, also an adoptee, died of a drug overdose. These sequential births and death put my life on a new trajectory, and I started writing, out of grief, the history of adoption and motherhood in America.
I grew up thinking that being adopted didn’t matter. I was wrong. This book is my journey uncovering the significance and true history of adoption practices in America. Now, in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women’s reproductive rights places an even greater emphasis on adoption. As a mother, historian, and adoptee, I am uniquely qualified to uncover the policies and practices of adoption.
The history of adoption, reframed through the voices of adoptees like me, and mothers who have been forced to relinquish their babies, blows apart old narratives…
Who Is a Worthy Mother?: An Intimate History of Adoption
Nearly every person in the United States is affected by adoption. Adoption practices are woven into the fabric of American society and reflect how our nation values human beings, particularly mothers. In the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade, the renewed debate over women's reproductive rights places an even greater emphasis on adoption. As a mother, historian, and adoptee, Rebecca C. Wellington is uniquely qualified to uncover the policies and practices of adoption. Wellington's timely-and deeply researched-account amplifies previously marginalized voices and exposes the social and racial biases embedded in the United States' adoption industry.…
