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The front cover of this new edition of Graham Music’s excellent and inspiring ‘Nurturing natures’ has a ‘puff’ from Jeremy Holmes saying: ‘Music is the David Attenborough of child development research’. At first glance, I was rather startled by that but having read the book I can see just what Professor Holmes had in mind. Something that most of us had only a faint awareness of - the depths and breadth of research into many aspects of child development - is shown to us by Music in a way that enables us to see and wonder, making the complicated child development research it describes lively and accessible. Music can be our trusted guide because although he is writing about research gathered from so many unfamiliar areas of study, the whole book is suffused by the way he thinks as a clinician, and his concern to introduce thinking, which therapists and other practitioners might find helpful in their work.
I wrote a review of the first edition of this book and at the time, when research in all its forms was much less embedded into the child psychotherapist’s way of thinking, I thought that the book was rather helpful, suggesting that I didn’t have to read ‘all that stuff’ because Graham Music had read it for me and given me an overview. Perhaps, because over the years our profession has developed a more embracing attitude to research - both our own and that of allied disciplines - I now find myself more interested in following up on various studies that he cites.
This book uses much of what was in earlier editions but has been massively updated, both in terms of the studies cited, and with some chapters, such as those on gender, race and culture, attachment and adolescence, more substantially re-written. Music acknowledges, for example, the cultural bias of previous research on attachment, commenting on ‘how transient and fleeting scientific and moral certainties can be,’ (p. 11).
The information is also presented in a more visually engaging way: there are numerous pictur