Lifespan Development: Cultural and Contextual Applications for the Helping Professions 1st Edition

This book on Lifespan Development has been so amazing for my masters program. I have learned so much and feel that it has applications and examples that will really help me in my future practice. It has opened my eyes to cultural and contextual concepts.

I didn’t like the format, it wasn’t as in depth for each of lifespan development theorists. But i do like they had icons and graphs and the cost was low compared to other textbooks. I used it in graduate school for my clinical psychology class.

Currently using this book for a course in my master’s program. 5 chapters in and not impressed - several theoretical frameworks are discussed in each chapter with only the most superficial detail. Plan on doing plenty of additional research and reading on your own to properly apply them to a case. The accompanying podcasts are terrible - you have to jump through several hoops on the publisher’s website to access them on a webpage. The actual content in the podcasts is dry, slow, and utterly boring; to top it off the embedded player doesn’t permit increasing the playback speed to reduce your agony. I’ll be glad when this course concludes.

I was excited for this book but I am not sure if doctoral level clinicians were part of the target audience. Although I appreciated a new take on the topic of lifespan development, I felt that the content was not deep enough for doctoral-level clinicians. Will I reference this text in the future? Maybe. Will I look for an updated version that takes a more advanced look at cultural and contextual issues? Most likely.