A Tender Loving Point in My Heart for Young Children

This post was supposed to be a book recommendation. I am reading this book named Theories of Development: Concepts and Applications (Fifth Edition) by William Crain, and I really love it! This book is assigned for the ENE695 Developmental Theories and Engineering Thinking class. I recommend it not because of it's theories or scientific methods or anything like this (though it does hold a very neutral, analytical and comparative perspective most of the time), because I am by no means an expert who could recommend a psychological book based on its content now. I recommend it simply because the way it is written. From my non-native English speaker's perspective, it is really well-written and easy to read and comprehend. The class assigns several other similar texts, but this is the one I am really into and think through. From a cognitive theories' perspective, it unloads my cognitive burden of struggling to understand and make sense of the texts, thus shifts my brain to engage in some deeper thinking. By the way, the cover picture of this book is really a nice art piece (They changed the picture in the 6th edition, but I like this one better). 

In my opinion, all intellectual productions should be presented in this kind of easy comprehensible ways, which could make communication and innovative activities so much easier. However, this is so far away from reality. At least, we need to try to reduce all those boring,empty, hard to read,...,intellectual garbage in every academia disciplines a little bit more and more.

Another thing I am feeling (this is a little bit off-topic here, it's an extended paragraphs about papers that I don't like) is that I begin to become dislike those papers about so-called "complete" "unified" or "integrated" models. They are different from the "intellectual garbage" I mentioned above, indeed, many of them are regarded of great value, I just personally don't like them. In my opinion, there are different theories, and different people have different opinions and different ways to make their arguments, and backup their claims. I used to always wonder there must be a way to unify them, to achieve a universal or at least eclectic theory. However, now I kind of like the existing of diversity. Just like the failure of achieving a universal theory in Physics, such kind of efforts are highly possible to be also failures in other fields. We just need to appreciate the difference, and different applications, like Newton's law and Relativity are both valid in their respective domains. 

Let's go back to the title of this post. This book is about the developmental and learning theories of mainly young children. After almost five years' "screaming" that I am interested in psychology, this is the first psychology book I really read through. This book evokes my love for working with young children. They are always my love. I am thinking creating a digital interactive touch book for children for a course project and also write something about the underlying psychological and cognitive principles of technologies and children, but this is only for a semester, I probably won't be able to fully engage in research about children in my later PhD years. It's okay, I have other also important topics that I need to investigate, but working with young children will always be my love. If I have any opportunities in the future, I will definitely go for it. :)