Preface to the 4th edition. Introduction: Commitments, Resources and Methodological Frameworks. PART I: Constructing the (developing) subject. Origin stories: How animals, humans, colonial and sex/gender dynamics structure the study of childhood. Researching Infancy: The conflation of the technical with the conceptual, and an ethical interruption. Attributing sociality: From smiling and jiggling to mentalisation, the problem of mirror perspectives, autism and the 'double empathy problem', ethical-political questions of culture, gender and (reproductive) technologies. Discoursing 'child': Psychology textbooks, 'children's 'needs', childcare advice and intensive mothering, the schooled child (and its relations with - the gendering of - ADHD), why (not to) breastfeed, the child subject of humanitarian aid - and its others. (Gendered) models of childhood (and parents): 'inner child', endangered (groomed?), bullied and dangerous children, working children, early intervention shrinking the social and how resilient babies' brains make national wealth. PART II: Social development and the structuring of care. Protecting children? Reporting, supporting and removing children, gendered, classed, colonial and racialised intersections, listening to children and a historical detour generates new perspectives on ACEs; climate anxiety and the 'child mental health crisis'. Familiar assumptions: de-naturalising the child-family-state (and stateless) nexus; and how 'age assessment' repeats the problems of cross-cultural psychology; key topics for researching children and families. Bonds of love and the making of attachment: mothers, nannies, and the global care chain; racialised, colonial and class overdeterminations and double standards, and legacies from Bowlby and Freud. Losing, saving or extending attachment: Retelling the origins of 'maternal deprivation' as empirical and ethical overreach, current cautionary reformulations and the importance of groups. Involving fathers: shifting masculinities, gendered tensions, and how these subvert or, alternatively, maintain developmental imperatives. PART III: Developing communication. Language talk: From labels to actions, routines and chunks; inner speech vs egocentrism, emotions in and through language, from monolingualism to multilingual, translanguaging and raciolinguistic perspectives. Discourses of caregiving talk: from adult adaptations and models to inter-generational, cultural and embodied perspectives. Language and power in developmental research: Seven examples of how power relations constitute and constrain speaking positions for children. PART IV: Cognitive development: the making of rationality and its others. The disciplining of Piaget and Vygotsky in the construction of developmental psychology: missing links, recent re-evaluations and what these indicate about how geopolitics structures psychological discourse. Child-centred education and beyond: from whole children to the regulation of families, home-schooling, what's wrong with 'play', 'schoolification', 'emotional intelligence' and the 'growth mindset', to re-interpreting the 'attainment gap' as racial capitalist governmentality. Morality and the goals of development: From children's games to ethical-political dilemmas of developmentalism, critical resources, and some proposals.
