32 Books Like Development Through Life

I met Peter at a conference years ago and will never forget the experience. His vision of the future was unique and compelling.

I found the book, his thinking completely out of the box, and his insight into major forces changing our world without peers. Peter ties money, politics, social change, and trends together, offering a peek into the challenges and direction of the future.

Brad was one of the first psychologists to recognize that how we think about money is critical to financial success. My book gives you the tools; Brad’s gives you the mindset for success.

I was surprised to find that so many of my friends and family are wired for one aspect of living but not for financial success. Being a great ball player or surgeon does not mean you will be a great saver or financial planner.

This book will open your eyes to the mental pitfalls that keep so many from success. My book will show you what you need to do; this book will clear away clutter you never knew existed to give you confidence that you are on the right track.  

Just the fact that this is the tenth edition tells me that this is a financial classic. Once your credit is solid and you know how to save, you’ll want to make your money grow. Understanding investment terms will demystify financial planners' and brokers' jargon so you won't be disadvantaged.

I like the fact that this book fits in my pocket and doesn’t weigh 50 pounds! I never have to ask, “What are you talking about?” when I meet an investment professional. It’s an easy-to-use resource.

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.

Every parent needs a good book on child development from the ages of birth to adulthood to understand how their child is growing in the physical, emotional, academic/cognitive, and social domains of development. When parents and caregivers understand what to expect at different ages, they can adapt their parenting decisions appropriately. Knowing if their child’s behaviour is a discipline issue that needs addressing or simply a development issue that will take care of itself, as a child ages, is the key to successful parenting.

I would heartily recommend this book to those interested in how musical abilities develop through childhood.

Hargreaves’ text was the first to put the developmental psychology of music on the map, identifying it as an important area of study for the first time and setting the scene for a major area of research in music psychology that continues to this day.

I love the way that Hargreaves combines empirical findings with observations of his own children in action, which makes it an engaging read.

Janice Hiller, a British clinical psychologist and psychosexual therapist who has taught for many years at the esteemed organisation Tavistock Relationships in Central London, has just released a new book on the interrelationship between sexual functioning and brain health, thus integrating psychoanalytical theory with neuroscience.

Hiller has devoted chapters to such compelling topics as kissing, commitment, parenting, infidelity, divorce, and so many more, teaching us all a great deal about the complex and intimate relationship between our brains and our minds and between our bodies and our sexual tendencies. Well-written and scientifically up-to-date, I have found this book to be a truly original endeavor at understanding the many underlying complexities of adult sexual behaviors.

Thomas Boyce not only has impeccable credentials as a pediatrician, academic, and epidemiologist, but he also has deep personal history motivating his writing of The Orchid and the Dandelion. That is, he not only knows this topic, he feels it. On top of all of that, he writes with a warmth and poetic sensitivity so often lacking in evidence-based books like this. Boyce writes about orchid children being exquisitely sensitive, so they absorb their environment and thrive under the right circumstances, becoming remarkably insightful and creative. Under adverse circumstances, however, orchid children wilt. Dandelion children, by contrast, are more resilient and can accommodate more adversity without showing too much harm. Another interesting dimension Boyce explores is how the family, school, community, and society can all have an impact on an orchid child’s development.

I am a great admirer of Dr. Siegel who is a clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine. This is a terrific book in which Siegel explores the role of interpersonal relationships in forging key connections in the brain. As he says, “Human connections shape neural connections, and each contributes to mind. Relationships and your personal linkages together shape the mind. It is more than the sum of its parts; this is the essence of emergence.” His description of brain architecture is excellent

Siegel’s emphasis on relationships is important and I fully agree with it. His take on the mind is interesting. He says, “The mind is a process that emerges from the distributed nervous system extended throughout the entire body and also from the communication patterns that occur within relationships.” I echo those sentiments in The Embodied Mind when I say that the mind is more… show more.

Most studies of child art describe development towards realism. Artful Scribbles is one of the first accounts to focus on the expressiveness and aesthetics of child art. Developmental psychologist Howard Gardner discusses in depth the puzzle of why the flowering of children’s art (as valued in the West in the last century) does not last. While drawings of 8- or 9-year-olds are more realistic and “accurate” than those of preschoolers, they seem to have lost the exploratory freshness of the art of younger children. This is one of the earliest studies of children’s art to take seriously the idea of the child as an artist and to consider the relationship between child art, modern art, and the art of adolescents and of mature artists.