Disorders of Childhood: Development and Psychopathology

This text is written with the whole child in mind and discusses disorders in connection with the different stages of development, providing both a meaningful framework to promote students' learning and a practical, true-to-life approach for organizing the course. Four themes recur throughout the text, each informed by the principles and practices of developmental psychopathology, an interdisciplinary approach that asserts that maladaptive patterns of emotion, cognition, and behavior occur in the context of normal development. The authors emphasize multi-factor explanations of disorders as well as developmental frameworks and developmental pathways--presenting disorders and sets of disorders in the order in which they typically appear in a child's life. They also focus on the child-in-context (calling attention to the multiple settings in which the child is embedded) and emphasize the importance of taking a broad view that considers the whole child and his or her patterns of interest, abilities, and strengths, rather than a narrow view of a disorder or developmental delay. As a result of this holistic approach, which reflects the most up-to-date understanding of child and adolescent psychopathology, students learn to think about disorders in the same way that caring adults think about disorders they encounter every day--in terms of an individual child who is coping with distress and dysfunction.