Katherine Nelson is Distinguished Professor of Psychology, Emerita, at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

• Preface 1. Modern Metaphors of the Developing Child 2. Perspectives on Meaning 3. Being an Infant, Becoming a Child 4. Toddling toward Childhood 5. Experiential Semantics of First Words 6. Entering the Symbolic World 7. Finding Oneself in Time 8. Entering a Community of Minds 9. The Study of Developing Young Minds Notes References Acknowledgments Index

Takes a pragmatic, experiential perspective on the process of early development to reveal how children obtain a sense of self and an understanding of the world around them through social interactions. Emphasizing that each child finds a different path through this developmental process, she argues that those studying children must assume a process orientation to address how the mind-culture symbiosis occurs for normally developing children...She makes a cogent case for adopting a developmental-systems approach in which systems, conceptualized as undergoing continuous dynamic change, need to maintain a coherence across change, a continuity of the whole over time, and a flexibility in the face of strong individual differences. This allows one to view children not as little scientists working to understand domain-specific issues but as emerging members of “communities of minds” striving to make sense of the world around them and to share that meaning with others.