Children, Parenthood, and Social Welfare in the Context of Developmental Psychology.

Abstract

This perceptive work examines the relationship between child development and social welfare, exploring the interactions between children's moral and intellectual development, their relationships with parents and peers, and the socioeconomic background in which they live. Drawing on many areas of developmental psychology, the author presents an integrated approach which stresses that a child's self-perception, as well as his or her perception of the nature of parenthood and of society, form a basis for marality and achievement in adolescence and early adulthood. Siegal considers the implications of shifting patterns of parenthood in recent years--the working mother, the increasingly mobile family--and he weighs the potential influence of an interventionist developmental psychology on social welfare policy.