About Frans Plooij

Frans X. Plooij, Ph.D. (1980), studied in the Netherlands with Adriaan Kortlandt, University of Amsterdam, with Hein Oomen, University of Nijmegen, and with Gerard Baerends, University of Groningen, where he received his Ph.D. He worked with Jane Goodall in the Gombe National Park, Tanzania, East-Africa, on infant development in free-living chimpanzees; with Robert Hinde in the Medical Research Council-unit on the Development and Integration of Behaviour, University Sub-department of Animal Behaviour in Madingley, Cambridge, England; at the department of Developmental Psychology, University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands; and as head of the department of Research and Development at an institute of Child Studies of the City of Amsterdam, the Netherlands, where he participated in SOCRATES-LINGUA European Union-projects concerning the implementation of an innovative second- and foreign-language teaching method for small schoolchildren, among other things. Thereafter he had a professor position at the Department of Developmental and Experimental Clinical Psychology, University of Groningen, the Netherlands. Now he is president of the International Research-institute on Infant Studies (IRIS) at Arnhem, the Netherlands, initiator of the European project on “the intercultural study of infantile regression periods” (ISIRP), and director of Kiddy World Promotions B.V., a consultancy serving companies producing any products related to children (e.g., toys).

He was Vice-president for Information of the International Society for Human Ethology from 1989-1993, Vice-president of the Institut Européen pour le Development de tous les Enfants (IEDPE), he served on the editorial board of the journal “Ethology and Sociobiology”, and he is member of the panel of assessors of the Journal of Clinical Child Psychology and Psychiatry.

He is a full member of various international, scientific societies in the domains of child development and behavioural biology, and of the New York Academy of Sciences.

Apart from his list of scientific publications he has written several best-selling parenting books, one of which (The Wonder Weeks) has been published in twelve languages, from the USA to Japan.