From Birth to Sixteen. Children's Health, Social, Emotional and Linguistic Development by Helen Cowie London,  Routledge, published 2019

This new edition of Cowie's innovative and broad-ranging textbook From Birth to Sixteen is a must-read for students and academic staff interested in children's physical, social, emotional, and cognitive development, from infancy through to adolescence. Structured into nine chapters, the book provides insight into a wide range of topics from the developing child, sense of self, and attachment through to peer relationships, language, communication and social media, and issues around addiction, obesity, eating disorders, safe and risky sexual behaviour, and mental health. As such, the book takes one on a journey, providing insight into the diverse ways in which children develop, including considerations of gender, ethnicity, social background, and disability. For example, Chapter Three on attachment makes useful observations in relation to culture and the fact that the ways in which care-givers express their sensitivity may vary depending on cultural context. Moreover, Cowie also explores disrupted attachment and related child behaviour in situations where children experience loss of parents, due to being taken into care for child protection reasons. As such, the book provides deep and contextualised insight into attachment across the lifespan. Issues around gender are also tackled, and in Chapter Four on peer relationships, Cowie provides a useful overview of gender roles in relation to in-groups and out-groups at school. Moreover, young people's perceptions of the rights of asylum-seeking children is also confronted in this chapter, a much-needed topic! This focus on a wide range of issues and areas influencing child development is continued in Chapter Five on language and communication, where issues around language and culture, as well as intersubjectivity and mind-mindedness are covered, to give a few examples. Chapter Six on engaging with social media is also a very topical chapter, and covers issues such as safeguarding children and young people, and related inte