Young Minds in Social Worlds: Experience, Meaning, and Memory

Katherine Nelson re-centers developmental psychology with a revived emphasis on development and change, rather than foundations and continuity. She argues that children be seen not as scientists but as members of a community of minds, striving not only to make sense, but also to share meanings with others.

A child is always part of a social world, yet the child's experience is private. So, Nelson argues, we must study children in the context of the relationships, interactive language, and culture of their everyday lives.

Nelson draws philosophically from pragmatism and phenomenology, and empirically from a range of developmental research. Skeptical of work that focuses on presumed innate abilities and the close fit of child and adult forms of cognition, her dynamic framework takes into account whole systems developing over time, presenting a coherent account of social, cognitive, and linguistic development in the first five years of life.

Nelson argues that a child's entrance into the community of minds is a slow, gradual process with enormous consequences for child development, and the adults that they become. Original, deeply scholarly, and trenchant, Young Minds in Social Worlds will inspire a new generation of developmental psychologists.

Ira Glovinsky - Journal of Developmental Processes

Katherine Nelson's Young Minds in Social Worlds is an immensely rich, fascinating, and exciting book that describes development from infancy as the evolution of a "private mind" that is different from every other private mind and that gradually unfolds as the child enters the meaning-sharing of a "community of minds" through the first five years of life...This book evokes feelings of exuberance and vitality in the reader...Anyone interested in the unfolding of the developmental processes will appreciate her writing and the rich information that she provides.

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