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This comprehensive book, whose senior author is an experienced clinician-researcher, presents an excellent review of recent findings on the psychological development of children. This expository section is followed by a detailed critique demonstrating how our current child-rearing practices conspire to deprive children of just those growth-enhancing experiences that were identified in the first section. The contrast between the lessons learned in the laboratory and consulting rooms and the prevalent cultural modes of behavior that undercut these lessons explain the full title of the work: The Growth of the Mind and the Endangered Origins of Intelligence.
The authors' major thesis is that humans have evolved as fundamentally social creatures whose brains are preprogrammed to appreciate and differentiate affect in an interpersonal context. The affective experience of the young child is needed to organize the mind and to begin to make sense of his or her surroundings, thus laying the basis for all later intellectual or cognitive abilities. Prior interpretations of cognitive development (principally those of the Piagetian school) conceived of this latter process as a somewhat sterile, nonrelational procedure without appreciating sufficiently that cognition, as all mental faculties, occurs as part of a social interchange with other individuals. The following short quote from the book can serve as an accurate summation of the author's entire argument:
Piaget identified the child's earliest awareness of causality in his using his motor system toward a specific end (e.g., pulling a string to ring a bell)—apparently without focusing on an even more basic example of the early sense of causality: the smile begetting the smile, or the frown begetting the puzzled look. It is the sense that inner affects and intents can produce affect and intents in others that establishes the psychological boundary necessary for the sense of causality and, later, reality testing. (p. 131)
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