. Your textbook provides current and comprehensive coverage of four contemporary concerns in life-span development: health and well-being, parenting and education, sociocultural contexts and diversity, and social policy. In your own words, explain the nature and importance of each of these four contemporary concerns. For each concern, also provide one example from your own life and times that illustrates how it relates to you personally.

2. Explain the meaning of (a) nature and nurture, (b) continuity and discontinuity, and (c) stability and change. Also, explain why current life-span developmentalists do not adopt extreme positions on the three issues.

3.  Define and distinguish the five systems in Bronfenbrenner’s ecological theory. Provide at least two examples of each system by citing aspects from your own personal life.

4. Describe development during the germinal, embryological, and fetal periods. Also, explain what factors might contribute to complications at specific times during gestation.

5. Define teratogen, and give at least two examples of teratogens and their specific effects.

6.  Describe the stages of birth, and also explain the role of midwives and doulas in the birth process.

7. Outline brain development during infancy, and speculate how brain development relates to behavioral and psychological development during this period of life.

8. Explain Piaget’s concept of a scheme, and give an example of both a behavioral scheme and a mental scheme. Explain the processes of assimilation and accommodation using these concepts.

9. Analyze your own temperament. Indicate whether your temperament is better explained by the Chess and Thomas or the Rothbart and Bates approach. Also indicate how stable your temperament has been over the course of your development, and what factors may have contributed to this stability or lack of stability.

10. Explain Erikson’s concept of trust versus mistrust. Give a hypothetical situation of a parent–infant interaction that leads to the infant developing trust and a hypothetical situation in which the infant would develop mistrust.