Normal Child and Adolescent Development

Book excerpt: Normal Child and Adolescent Development is an exceptional learning tool for beginning mental health professionals engaged in training programs to prepare for work with children, adolescents, and adults with mental and behavioral problems. Throughout the book, illustrative examples of normal and abnormal development are presented to demonstrate the usefulness of normal development concepts in understanding abnormal development. Intended as an introduction to child and adolescent mental development, this book describes each major stage of the development process, integrating each major aspect of development with the leading developmental theories. Each chapter follows the same basic outline to help the reader understand the continuous nature of the child's mental development through succeeding developmental phases. This schematic organization emphasizes that children's mental development is continuous as well as discontinuous: their representational world provides the continuous "landscape" from which they progressively perceive the social world using their increasingly more complex perceptual and cognitive capabilities; discontinuous in the sense that children's maturational advances, coupled with new life events, will produce relatively unexpected developmental changes in them. The text includes several important concepts of normal mental development. A thorough understanding of the id, ego, superego and the self; the unconscious mental domain; implicit versus explicit memories; the development of the internal distress signal; mechanisms of defense; transference reactions; and mental organizing principles is essential for any practitioner who will ultimately be involved in evaluatory and treatment work with mentally disturbed children, adolescents, and adults.