Teen-aged girls hate their bodies and diet obsessively, or so we hear. News stories and reports of survey research often claim that as many as three girls in five are on a diet at any given time, and they grimly suggest that many are “at risk” for eating disorders. But how much can we believe these frightening stories? What do teenagers mean when they say they are dieting?

Anthropologist Mimi Nichter spent three years interviewing middle school and high school girls—lower-middle to middle class, white, black, and Latina—about their feelings concerning appearance, their eating habits, and dieting. In Fat Talk, she tells us what the girls told her, and explores the influence of peers, family, and the media on girls’ sense of self. Letting girls speak for themselves, she gives us the human side of survey statistics.

Most of the white girls in her study disliked something about their bodies and knew all too well that they did not look like the envied, hated “perfect girl.” But they did not diet so much as talk about dieting. Nichter wryly argues—in fact some of the girls as much as tell her—that “fat talk” is a kind of social ritual among friends, a way of being, or creating solidarity. It allows the girls to show that they are concerned about their weight, but it lessens the urgency to do anything about it, other than diet from breakfast to lunch. Nichter concludes that if anything, girls are watching their weight and what they eat, as well as trying to get some exercise and eat “healthfully” in a way that sounds much less disturbing than stories about the epidemic of eating disorders among American girls.

Black girls, Nichter learned, escape the weight obsession and the “fat talk” that is so pervasive among white girls. The African-American girls she talked with were much more satisfied with their bodies than were the white girls. For them, beauty was a matter of projecting attitude (“’tude”) and moving with confidence and style.

Fat Talk takes the reader into the lives of girls as daughters, providing insights into how parents talk to their teenagers about their changing bodies. The black girls admired their mothers’ strength; the white girls described their mothers’ own “fat talk,” their fathers’ uncomfortable teasing, and the way they and their mothers sometimes dieted together to escape the family “curse”—flabby thighs, ample hips. Moving beyond negative stereotypes of mother–daughter relationships, Nichter sensitively examines the issues and struggles that mothers face in bringing up their daughters, particularly in relation to body image, and considers how they can help their daughters move beyond rigid and stereotyped images of ideal beauty.

Daniel Stern's pathbreaking video-based research into the intimate complexities of mother-infant interaction has had an enormous impact on psychotherapy and developmental psychology. His minute analyses of the exchanges between mothers and babies have offered empirical support and correction for many theories of development. In the complex and instinctive choreography of "conversations," including smiles, gestures, and gazing, Stern discerned patterns of both emotional harmony and emotional incongruity that illuminate children's relationships with others in the larger world.

Now a noted authority on early development, Stern first reviewed his unique methods and observations in The First Relationship. Intended for parents as well as for therapists and researchers, it offers a lucid and nontechnical overview of the author's key ideas and encapsulates the major themes of his subsequent books.

"When I reread The First Relationship I was astonished to find in it almost all the ideas that have guided my work in the subsequent decades. At first I didn't know whether to be depressed or delighted. As I thought it over, I am encouraged by the realization that I had some basic perspective at the very beginning that was sufficiently well founded to guide twenty-five years of observation and ideas...This book makes it possible to see, or foresee, the unfolding of an intrinsic design."
--from the new introduction by Daniel Stern

In a remarkable synthesis of the research of the last two decades, a leading developmental neuroscientist provides psychologists with a sophisticated introduction to the brain—the system that underpins the functions that they study.

In clear terms, with ample illustrations, Joan Stiles explains the complexities of genetic variation and transcription, and the variable paths of neural development, from embryology through early childhood. She describes early developmental processes from gene expression to physiology to behavior. Sections on clinical correlations show the consequences for later physiological, neurological, or psychological disturbances in neural development.

As Stiles shows, brain development is far more complex and dynamic than is often assumed in debates about nature vs. nurture, nativism vs. cultural learning. Inherited and experienced factors interact constantly in an ever-changing organism. The key question is, what developmental processes give rise to particular structures or mechanisms?

A landmark of synthesis and interdisciplinary illumination, The Fundamentals of Brain Development will enrich discussion of developmental processes and more rigorously define the terms that are central to psychological debates.