Drawing on the latest research on development among toddlers and preschoolers, At a Loss for Words lays out the importance of getting parents, policy makers, and child care providers to recognize the role of early literacy skills in reducing the achievement gap that begins before three years of age. Readers are guided through home and classroom settings that promote language, contrasting them with the "merely mediocre" child care settings in which more and more young children spend increasing amounts of time. Too many of our young children are not receiving the level of input and practice that will enable them to acquire language skills—the key to success in school and life. Bardige explains how to build better community support systems for children, and better public education, in order to ensure that toddlers learn the power of language from their families and teachers.

In the fourteen articles collected in this volume, Carol Gilligan and her colleagues expand the theoretical base of In a Different Voice and apply their research methods to a variety of life situations. The contrasting voices of justice and care clarify different ways in which women and men speak about relationships and lend different meanings to connection, dependence, autonomy, responsibility loyalty, peer pressure, and violence. By examining the moral dilemmas and self-descriptions of children, high school students, urban youth, medical students, mothers, lawyers, and others, the authors chart a new terrain: a mapping of the moral domain that includes the voices of women. In this new terrain the authors trace far-reaching implications of the inclusion of women’s voices for developmental psychology, for education, for women, and for men.