Human Development

Kail and Cavanaugh "tell the story of the life span" in a narrative that is intuitive and holistic-eliminating the redundancy of describing the life span via the tradional 5 x 3 of similar organizational structure used by many texts for the course. The book's four-part structure reflects "early childhood," "the school years," "the working/raising children years," and "later life" - a structure that makes sense to strudents and more accurately depicts the developmental process. The author's four-part structure reflects the emerging view in several disciplines that development needs to be viewed in larger sefments to reflect both the reality of large individual differences (not all five-year-olds are the same) and the linkages across the life span of such domains as memory, language, perception, etc. To reflect these issues, the text includes age-specific chapters where essential (prenatal develpment, adolescence, entering adulthood, middle age, later life) and more topical chapter where appropriate to reflect the continuity of development (entering the social world, the school years, relationships, work in adulthood, and dying and bereavement).