The Magic Years: Understanding and Handling the Problems of Early Childhood. Psychology / Childhood / Over a million copies in print.

Beschreibung

305 p., Good condition. -- The magic years are the years of early childhood. By "magic" I do not mean that the child lives in an enchanted world where all the deepest longings are satisfied. It is only in the minds of adults that childhood is a paradise, a time ot innocence and serene joy. The memory of a Golden Age is a delusion for, ironically, none of us remembers this time at all. At best we carry with us a few dusty memories, a handful of blurred and distorted pictures which often cannot even tell us why they should be remembered. This first period of childhood, roughly the first five years of life, is submerged like a buried city, and when we come back to these times with our children we are strangers and we cannot easily find our way. -- These are "magic" years because the child in his early years is a magician-in the psychological sense. His earliest conception of the world is a magical one; he believes that his actions and his thoughts can bring about events. Later he extends this magic system and finds human attributes in natural phenomena and sees human or supra-human causes for natural events or for ordinary occurrences in his life. Gradually during these first years the child acquires knowledge of an objective world and is able to free his observations and his conclusions from the distortions of primitive thought. -- But a magic world is an unstable world, at times a spooky world, and as the child gropes his way toward reason and an objective world he must wrestle with the dangerous creatures of his imagination and the real and imagined dangers of the outer world, and periodically we are confronted with his inexplicable fears or baffling behavior. Many of the problems presented by the child in these early years are, quite simply, disorders created by a primitive mental system that has not yet been subdued and put into its place by rational thought processes. -- This book tells the story of personality development during the first five years of life and describes and discusses some of the typical problems that emerge with each developmental stage. I have tried to make this a practical book and for illustration have drawn extensively from the questions and problems that parents of normal children have brought to me over a period of years. But, as every parent knows, there are no short answers to the riddles posed by children even in the pre-school years. There are no household hints, directions before using, or universal antidotes to be prescribed in the rearing of a child. It is the quality of our understanding, often the intuitive understanding of a parent who is in intimate rapport with his child, that provides us with the right method at critical moments. But the inner life of a very young child is often inaccessible to us. Because we cannot remember this time of life, we cannot easily enter his world and adult intuition and imagination often fail before the problems presented by the pre-school child. (excerpt from the preface) ISBN 9780684717685 Sprache: Englisch Gewicht in Gramm: 338.

Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers 1172151

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Bibliografische Details

Titel

The Magic Years: Understanding and Handling the Problems of Early Childhood. Psychology / Childhood / Over a million copies in print.

Verlag

New York, Charles Scribner's Sons.

Veröffentlichungsdatum

1989

Sprache

Englisch

ISBN-10

0684717689

ISBN-13

9780684717685

Bindung

Paperback.

Zustand

Gut

Verkäuferkataloge

• Psychologie

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