There are lots of books that do that, or anyway say they do, right between the cooking and house repairs sections in your local bookstore. Our questions are both harder and easier than the practical questions. We want to understand children, not renovate them. While the purported answers to the practical questions fill volumes, all of us who have lived with babies and young children, or even just looked at them, have found tourselves asking deeper questions. We decided to become developmental psychologists and study children because there aren't any Martians.
Babies are fascinating, mysterious, and just plain weird.
Developmental psychologists have had the luxury of asking those questions systematically, and even getting answers to them. We're actually starting to understand what's going on in that little head of hers, and where on earth he got that from. Studying babies is full of fascination in its own right. But developmental research also helps answer a more general, deep, and ancient question, not just about babies, but about us. We human beings, no more than a few pounds of protein and water, have come to understand the origins of the universe, the nature of life, and even a few things about ourselves.