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The Dynamic Child, 3rd edition

Published by Pearson (October 9, 2024) © 2025

  • Frank Manis

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$89.99

  • Inspire engagement through active learning
  • Provide an immersive reading experience
  • Assess student progress with performance insights

For courses in Child Development.

The market-leading, hands-on way to experience child development

Frank Manis’s The Dynamic Child provides students with a unique, immersive learning experience. Utilizing a “learn-by-doing” approach, The Dynamic Child combines a compelling, original narrative with Manis’s best-selling MyVirtualChild simulation. The result is a learning resource that makes child development research and theory comprehensible and deeply meaningful.

The 3rd Edition includes the updated MyVirtualChild 3.0 and covers contemporary topics such as the replicability crisis in psychology and social inequality.

Hallmark features of this title

  • Frank Manis employs 4 key themes to convey the excitement of contemporary research and theory in developmental science in a way that’s deeply engaging to students.
    • A focus on developmental systems theories guides learners to view the child and the environment in terms of bidirectional influences over time.
    • A storytelling approach to explaining research studies makes the findings more interesting and memorable.
    • A holistic approach to development helps students see how development in one domain is connected to development in other domains.
    • Coverage of how developmental research contributes to improving children’s lives highlights the practical side of developmental science.

New and updated features of this title

  • UPDATED: The 3rd Edition has been updated with more than 2,100 new research citations, including more than 800 from 2018 through 2024. In order to reflect a more diverse range of the population, several studies of development in low- and middle-income and developing nations have been added.
  • NEW: The text acknowledges the current replicability crisis in psychology and explains what developmental scientists are doing about it, such as conducting meta-analyses, employing larger samples, and using open science practices.
  • UPDATED: A new emphasis on biological data reflects current practices in the field. The text includes coverage of non-invasive biological measures in use today, including EEG, structural and functional MRI scans, near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS), and assays of hormones.
  • UPDATED: The 3rd Edition focuses on issues of social inequality. Chapters 9, 12 and 15 provide new or expanded discussions of ethnic-racial identification, racial bias, prejudice and anti-racism interventions.
  • UPDATED: Concluding Thoughts features have been expanded to include a review of all topics in the chapter using the prompt, “If you had to sum up what you have learned in this chapter, what would you say?” These sections encourage students to engage in a thoughtful review of what they’ve read.

Features of Revel for the 3rd Edition

An integrated digital learning experience makes child development resonant

  • UPDATED: MyVirtualChild is an engaging simulation that immerses students in raising a child from the prenatal period through age 18. Just like in the real world, students’ parenting decisions and life choices combine with environmental and genetic factors to shape the development of the virtual child. By immersing students in a customizable virtual world, MyVirtualChild shows how developmental concepts play out over the course of childhood. The new Version 3.0 reflects issues today’s parents deal with, including social media use and screen time, bullying at school or online and more.
  • Seamless integration of MyVirtualChild enables students to raise their virtual children as they read without having to open new windows or leave the platform.
  • Designed around anchored instruction techniques, The Dynamic Child offers experiential learning activities before presenting core concepts. This approach activates students’ existing knowledge and incites curiosity.

An interactive learning framework helps students apply concepts

  • Observing the Dynamic Child video activities help students internalize key concepts.
  • Thinking About the Whole Child group activities prompt students to compare their virtual children with those of their classmates, and form hypotheses about the sources of individual differences.
  • Analyzing Your Virtual Child reports pose broad questions that help students synthesize and understand important concepts.
  • UPDATED: Videos throughout Revel explicate key topics. The 3rd Edition includes 7 new videos on subjects like the COVID-19 pandemic’s impact on schools and assisted reproductive technology.
  • UPDATED: Interactive review activities enable students to check their understanding. For the 3rd Edition, they appear at the end of each module rather than only at the end of each chapter to afford students more opportunities to review their understanding.

Part 1: Foundations of Developmental Science

  1. The Study of Child and Adolescent Development
  2. Heredity and Environment
  3. Prenatal Development, Birth and the Newborn

Part 2: Infancy and Toddlerhood

  1. Physical Development and Health in Infants and Toddlers
  2. Cognitive Development in Infants and Toddlers
  3. Social and Emotional Development in Infants and Toddlers

Part 3: Early Childhood

  1. Physical Development and Health in Early Childhood
  2. Cognitive and Language Development in Early Childhood
  3. Social and Emotional Development in Early Childhood

Part 4: Middle Childhood

  1. Physical Development and Health in Middle Childhood
  2. Cognitive Development in Middle Childhood
  3. Social and Emotional Development in Middle Childhood

Part 5: Adolescence

  1. Physical Development and Health in Adolescence
  2. Cognitive Development in Adolescence
  3. Social and Emotional Development in Adolescence

About our authors

Professor Frank Manis received his B.A. from Pomona College in 1975 and Ph.D. from the University of Minnesota in 1981. He is a retired professor of psychology at the University of Southern California, where he has taught (and continues to teach part-time), both undergraduate and graduate courses in developmental psychology and literacy development since 1981. He has published about 70 articles and book chapters on child development, reading disabilities, development of literacy in both the primary and secondary language, and cognitive functioning in special populations of children. Much of this work was funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. The major focus of his research has been on the identification of cognitive processes underlying differences in reading skills among children with reading disabilities.

Frank reviews for several journals in the field, including Scientific Studies of Reading, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology and Developmental Psychology, and was editor of Scientific Studies of Reading for 6 years. He is also the co-author of MyVirtualChild (with Mike Radford) and MyVirtualLife (with Julie Taylor-Massey), interactive websites for simulating the process of child, adolescent and adult development. Frank was a member of the University of Southern California’s Center for Excellence in Teaching from 2006 to 2009, was a Dornsife Distinguished Faculty Fellow from 2011 to 2013, and received teaching, research and service awards at his university in 2004 and 2012.

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Revel

Inspire engagement through active learning. Revel® integrates interactives and assessments into a compelling digital narrative. By applying concepts as they read, students immerse themselves in learning, deepening their understanding. This mobile, user-friendly platform empowers students to learn and study on the go, anytime, anywhere, on any device.

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