The study of children's minds got off track, Greenspan thinks, when investigators started watching youngsters putting pegs in holes rather than taking part in interpersonal actions. Greenspan's major thesis is that emotional relatedness is a substantial element in the child's mental development. He demonstrates the importance of emotions not only in the child's relations with family members but also in education, socializing, conflict resolution, and the prevention of violence both between individuals and in groups. Emotions, Greenspan argues, play roles in the organization of experience and behavior and even in the conceiving of abstractions; indeed, emotions affect the entire structure of personality (the fundamental limitation of artificial intelligence is that a computer can't experience emotion). Until educators learn how to foster the individual child's emotional growth, he maintains, they will continue to shortchange the future of our country.

ISBN 0738200263