Spencer A. Rathus

If you are taking a CDE course, check to see if the professor is using this textbook. If they are, find another section. This book is the worst non-religious book I've read on child development. It actually suggests, in the first chapter, that it might be prudent to give a child a good, hard spanking if they, say, try to run out into traffic. It has been proven unequivocally that hitting a child only produces a child who complies in front of the abuser, as well as likely creating a child who hits others when they are don't like what the other person did.

Other problems are: 1) The inordinate time they spend presenting Freud without spending a similar amount of time explaining that almost everything Freud taught has been debunked by multiple studies. 2) The way transgender children are presented as just feeling like they are another gender. This has not been appropriate language for longer than the sixth edition has been in publication (2016). I have been associated with the transgender community through one of my children who is trans and no one who is involved in advocating for them would ever say the child/adult "feels" like another gender.

There are several other problems as well, but I think those three should give anyone a good idea of what to expect in the rest of the book. Any professor who is still using this textbook has no business teaching future teachers. I have already noticed some of the students in my class (they are all taking it to teach preschool and elementary school) have taken these terrible ideas to heart and are firmly convinced now of things like "preschool children can be terribly selfish" because, of course, the book does not focus on how wrong Freud was.… (meer)