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 1.1 Who needs to have a good understanding of child development and why?

 1.2 What are the domains of child development and some recurring issues in the field?

 1.3 What are the contexts for child development?

 1.4 How can you be a smart consumer of information about development?

Take a moment to think about why you want to learn about children, adolescents, and their development. You may enjoy the interactions you have with children and want to understand them better, or your career goal may involve working with children or adolescents. Perhaps you want to better understand yourself or those you know by exploring how childhood has affected who you have become. Your interest may be more scientific, with a focus on understanding the research that explains the processes of development. Your particular goal will influence how you approach the information in this book.

The information and activities in this book have been designed to stimulate your thinking in all these ways. We want to share with you the excitement we feel about the topic of child and adolescent development and to pique your curiosity so that you will want to learn even more about it. By the time you finish reading this book, you will have a solid foundation in a number of important topics related to development. It is our hope that this will motivate you to continue learning about children and their development long after you have completed this course.

In this first chapter, we introduce some of the basic concepts of child and adolescent development. We first look at why people study children and some ways they use knowledge about children to promote positive development. If you are curious about how you might use this knowledge in a future career, an Active Learning feature leads you through the process of researching careers that require a good understanding of child and adolescent development. We then discuss some basic themes related to how development occurs and introduce you to the different contexts that influence children’s lives. Finally, we provide strategies and guidelines that will enable you to differentiate reliable information from other material you may encounter as you study child development.