Columbia

As part of work-study at Columbia College, I was assigned to be a Research Assistant in the Psychology Department and matched with a graduate student, Tony Wright, who taught me rigors of the scientific method as we conducted experiments on pigeon color vision. As a result of that extraordinary personal and intellectual experience (far better than my previous job reshelving books in Low Memorial Library, where, however, I could disappear into the stacks and read widely), the next year I moved from art history and physics and declared a major in psychology.

Yale

After gaining a BA, I matriculated in psychology at Yale University which offered me the freedom and resources to pursue my interests in perception and cognition and to add development and culture to the intellectual mix. I first came under the tutelage of Larry Marks, with whom I studied visual psychophysics leading to an MS and several “LEM” and “MHB” graphs in collaborative papers. However, I was soon seduced by developmental questions (about the infant origins of vision) thanks to a formative proseminar with Bill Kessen. Although I continued to work with Marks throughout my graduate career, I switched advisors to the developmentalist Kessen with the thought to conduct a dissertation study of infant color vision. (The topic was instigated by Darwin but had not benefitted from systematic developmental research for nearly a century.) Thinking that infants, like pigeons, are mute but “thinking” organisms with whom the experimenter needs to establish some mode of “communication” to ask questions and get answers, I proposed a set of experiments that would use conditioned head turning as that means of communication. The paradigm had been developed by a Czech pediatrician Hanuš Papoušek. Fortuitously, Papoušek was then at the Center for Cognitive Studies at Harvard. On my writing to him, Papoušek immediately agreed to teach me the technique and made me a teaching assistant in his summer school course on “Systems.” So, developmental research with infants could be my dissertation.

Not knowing whether such a novel infancy adventure would succeed and as I continued collaborations with Marks in visual psychophysics, to hedge my bets I recruited a doctoral dissertation committee that agreed to the following unusual and flexible scheme: if my proposed infancy study succeeded, Kessen would be my committee chair, Marks co-chair, and my degree would be in developmental psychology; but if the infancy study failed, Marks would be my committee chair, Kessen co-chair, and my degree would be in cognitive psychology. I then proceeded with two PhD dissertations simultaneously: during the daytime I conducted a study of infant color perception, preferences, and categories; and during the nighttime I investigated spectral sensitivity of the retinal periphery. (For the baby study, I apprenticed myself to the shop foreman in the Psychology Department and constructed a novel apparatus with a continuous interference filter monochromator, the design of which I published with the foreman; for the adult study, I devised a new technique based on flicker photometry.) Conditioned head turning with the infants was a bust, but I found success using looking time and habituation, and eventually the infant work succeeded (including a Science paper); the adult psychophysics studies also happily found their way into appropriate vision journals.

The MPI

To follow the PhD, I wrote a successful NIH postdoctoral training grant, but then-President Nixon temporarily froze the government budget for such awards. By that time Papoušek had taken a position at the Max-Planck-Institut für Psychiatrie in Munich and kindly invited me to be a visiting scientist there for a year. Hanuš and his family, some science, and an unconscionable amount of extraordinary European travel made the stay in Munich memorable. When government funding eventually thawed, I returned to Yale to pursue studies into the early development of vision as a US Public Health Service Postdoctoral Research Fellow.

Princeton

After two productive postdoctoral stints, I accepted a position in psychology at Princeton University. During several years at Green Hall, I won federal and foundation grants to continue laboratory research in perception and cognition in children, adults, and the aged. At that time, my research foci developed around four interlocked questions. First, my laboratory investigations in perception and cognition continued to address questions of the origins of knowledge. Second, striking individual variation in infant performance led me to ask about the sources of those individual differences. To answer that question, I looked to inspect infants’ worldly experiences and designed systematic home observations of infants’ naturalistic interactions with their social and material environments. Those studies led me, third, to wonder whether individual differences in infancy foretell any future development. Many scholars had drawn a bright-line division between the mute and motorically inept infant and the talking, walking, thinking child. To answer questions about developmental stability and continuity, I designed longitudinal studies of infants’ laboratory performance and their quotidian experiences in relation to their later development. The findings from these studies contributed to growing challenges to antiquated views about the disconnectedness of human infancy in the lifespan and about early cognitive development as unmeasurable, unstable, and not predictive. We now know that infants’ abilities and experiences help to shape their development, raising further questions of whether and how cultural variation in early experience predicts cultural variation across development. To answer this fourth question, I instigated extensive cross-cultural work. Together, these several questions stimulated a program of empirical study which has charted the four research directions I have pursued in depth since.

The NICHD

Alas, New York City and NYU at that time presented formidable obstacles to family life, and I was seduced away from NYU to become Head of Child and Family Research (CFR) at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) in the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda. In those days the NICHD fostered the growth of research scientists, and I took full advantage to exploit the promise of being a full-time senior research scientist in a national laboratory (elaborated in a later section).

In the Laboratory

One strand of my research has continued to focus on traditional and novel laboratory and observational studies of lifespan psychological processes. It spans from attention and information processing to categorization and memory to the prediction of mental life and theory of mind to symbolic play and parenting cognitions and practices. These experimental investigations marshal genetic and hormonal analyses; measurements of the autonomic nervous system (cardiac function) and central nervous system (TMS, EEG, ERP, fNIRS, fMRI); and behavioral experimentation (eye tracking, habituation); as well as standardized assessments, questionnaires, and interviews. In an integrated and programmatic way, the substantive topics include neural and psychophysiological functioning, psychomotor skills, perceptual abilities, cognitive capacities, communicative competencies, personality characteristics, and emotional adjustment and social interactions of children and their mothers and other caregivers.

This program has also been designed to examine both typical and atypical developmental trajectories and how growth patterns are shaped by the individual’s predispositions, by characteristics of the individual’s parent, family, and extended social network, by the natural and designed environments, and by culture and time. It describes, analyzes, and assesses the capabilities and experiences of developing individuals and consequences for their lives.

Among Families

A second research strand marshals multidomain, multivariate, multiwave, multireporter designs that have involved, in a twenty-three-year longitudinal cohort and associated samples, thousands of families from infancy to young adulthood. It has also drawn on national data sets such as the Early Head Start Research and Evaluation cohort. This research embeds prospective longitudinal evaluations of child development and parenting across major sociodemographic comparisons (maternal age, parity, and parenthood, employment, childcare, and socioeconomic statuses) at multiple ages (infancy, toddlerhood, preschool, preadolescence, early and late adolescence, and young adulthood). The proximal goals are to capture the individuality and complexity of children, to trace sources of their strengths and weaknesses, and to chart trajectories of stability and continuity in their development across multiple time points in a relational systems developmental framework. These data have yielded micro- and macro-analytic comparisons, sequential analyses, within-age-between-group comparisons, within-group-across-age comparisons, and between-group-across-age comparisons of patterns of development, as well as insights into developmental systems and transactions.

Across Cultures

Most research in developmental and parenting science has been and still is North American or Western European in focus, regions of the minority world that account for less than 10 percent of the global population. So these literatures fail to represent more than 90 percent of the majority world. My third research strand therefore aimed to contribute to remedying this imbalance. This strand complements so-called WEIRDFootnote ¹ social and behavioral science with cultural and multicultural extensions. To realize this aim, I founded an International Network of Child Development and Parenting involving collaborations in fifteen countries on five continents. As no nation state is culturally homogenous, this research was also designed to sample different cultural groups in each country in order to examine meaningful within-country comparisons. For example, I recruited three samples of acculturating US immigrant families studied for themselves and in relation to families living in their culture of destination (i.e., to US European Americans) and in their respective cultures of origin.

Adding to this cross-cultural research program, I established collaborations with or exploited several other international longitudinal datasets. Two are situated in specific countries. One is Children of the 90s (originally the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children or ALSPAC), begun as a longitudinal epidemiological effort to comprehensively characterize the lives of all children born in the county of Avon, UK, in a given year. The other is the Bavarian Longitudinal Study, a South German cohort study of infants born over the span of one year but admitted to neonatal special care in the first days of life. Two other efforts are cross-national in design. One takes advantage of the UNICEF Multiple Indicator Cluster Surveys (MICS) – nationally representative and internationally comparable sets of household canvasses administered every three years in more than fifty majority world countries to millions of participants to examine protective and risk factors in the child and family, the environment, and national status. The other cross-cultural effort, Parenting Across Cultures, studies parenting and child and adolescent development longitudinally in eleven cultural groups in nine countries.

This multicultural body of research advances a nuanced understanding of contextual factors that shape developmental trajectories of child, parent, and family. The global library of video recordings of naturalistic interactions of mothers and children I collected in the NICHD has been called a “national treasure” and has been mined by collaborators from international universities and research institutions. This research is also of theoretical interest for two reasons: contrasting styles of child development and child-rearing are directly compared in the contexts of unique cultural variations and because intra-cultural and cross-cultural research can identify and differentiate both cultural-general and culture-specific developmental and psychological processes. This work has resulted in a plethora of scientific reports, journal special issues, monographs, and books with foci on many characteristics of child, parent, family, culture, and nation state development. Reflecting these collaborations, the research has been published in thirteen languages, and I have given invited presentations and named lectureships in more than two dozen countries.

Behavior Pediatrics

My fourth research strand pursues detailed studies of various socially and medically challenged populations to address questions at the interface of biology and development in atypical and typical human samples. Participants include socially diverse samples of low-SES, adopted, bilingual, and immigrant families as well as biologically compromised samples of cocaine-exposed, disabled, hearing-impaired, clinically depressed, preterm, and cancer-stricken children, and children with Down syndrome and ASD (autism spectrum disorder). Longitudinal studies of fetal-to-child development across parturition have been part of this program.

This fourth strand holds practical and clinical meaning and bridges to applied areas of consideration. Finally, it brings both developmental and parenting issues and principles from the first three research strands to bear on significant questions about children’s biopsychosocial development and health and well-being.

Taken together, these research strands have aggregated into a body of empirical findings that assess the nature and development of psychological and developmental constructs, structures, functions, and processes in the individual and family. The research frames the child, parent, and family in a system by placing the science in the contexts of biology and society, and so complements close laboratory experimental approaches with naturalistically occurring field observations. Its contextual biopsychosocial framework incorporates extrafamilial and situational factors to help explain individual development and family processes. The work also incorporates a transactional perspective by identifying parent effects on child, child effects on parent, and their reciprocal influences through time.

Developing a Field of Study

Library and bookstore shelves are chock-a-block with books about parenting, but most have programs to sell or axes to grind and are based on authors’ opinions. Missing was an evidence-based science of parenting. In the mid 1990s I approached an academic publisher with the idea of filling this lacuna and establishing parenting as a scientific discipline. What would an academic field of parenting look like? I argued that any authentically professional discipline should be buttressed with a scientific journal, a comprehensive handbook, and a multi-study monograph series. On the scientific journal, just as planning talks with the publisher were reaching fruition, I assumed a six-year position as Editor-in-Chief of Child Development, the flagship journal of the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD). So inauguration of the journal Parenting: Science and Practice waited six years until 2000. The journal has seen increases in submissions virtually every year since, and I have been its Editor-in-Chief for twenty-four years. The Handbook of Parenting had a quicker start: the first edition (four volumes) appeared in 1995, the second (five volumes) in 2002, and the third (five volumes) in 2019. That edition has ninety-five chapters written by 224 authors and has been called the “who’s who of the what’s what.” Beginning in 2007, Monographs in Parenting published seven volumes and has now been replaced by Studies in Parenting with eight volumes published, in press, or in preparation.

Parenting: Selected Works

Representative empirical and theoretical papers of my work in parenting have been published in a single volume (Bornstein, Reference Bornstein2022). Each paper treats a different, self-contained, fundamental, and challenging contemporary perspective on parenting, yet the collection as a whole endeavors to enhance a science of parenting by highlighting five central themes prominent in parenting theory, research, and practice: who parents, who it is that parents parent, the scope of parenting, the determinants of parenting, and the nature, structure, and meaning of parenting. To my enormous satisfaction, the academic field of parenting has matured into a sophisticated and variegated discipline that encompasses and enhances all these perspectives.

Scientific Publishing

I am a peripatetic scientist and have published in parenting and experimental, methodological, comparative, developmental, and cultural science as well as neuroscience, pediatrics, and aesthetics. Grounded in the work described above, I have written or edited dozens of books, including the three-volume Psychology and Its Allied Disciplines, six editions of Development in Infancy, eight editions of Developmental Science: An Advanced Textbook, and the five-volume SAGE Encyclopedia of Lifespan Human Development. Among several editing adventures, I was Editor-in-Chief of Child Development; I am founding Editor-in-Chief of Parenting: Science and Practice, Editor-in-Chief of the Cambridge University Press Elements in Child Development, Series Editor of Studies in Parenting, and past Series Editor of the Monographs in Parenting and Crosscurrents in Contemporary Psychology. As author of hundreds of scientific papers and chapters in scholarly collections, I was named to the Top 20 Authors for Productivity in Developmental Science by the American Educational Research Association.

Outreach and Application

I have also geared my professional efforts to disseminate research on child development, parenting, family processes, and culture to multiple communities – including practitioners, policymakers, educators, and parents. These efforts have been organized to make developmental science and parenting meaningful, appealing, and flourishing areas of inquiry. Two platforms merit elaboration.

UNICEF. I have consulted for UNICEF serially since the 1970s. For example, I was a member of a small interdisciplinary group who met regularly at UNICEF’s Innocenti Center in Florence, Italy. UNICEF’s charge to our group was to devise future-oriented and relevant ways to address children in desperate circumstances. Based on an earlier camping trip in the Sinai where I met international peacekeeping UN troops permanently stationed between Egyptians and Israelis, I suggested that our group develop a series of permanent plans (such as a schoolroom-in-a-box) that could be deployed to normalize life for children in flood- and earthquake-prone lands around the globe. I have also organized training workshops for UNICEF and country staff undertaking parenting programs in different regions of the world, and I organized for UNICEF a Forum on the Future of Parenting Programs that resulted in the codification of best practices to design, implement, and scale up parenting programs in majority world countries.Footnote ²

SRCD. I have also serviced several professional organizations. SRCD is the premier scientific organization in the world concerned with the study of child development. I joined SRCD in the 1970s and devoted eighteen years of my academic life to the society: six as Editor-in-Chief of Child Development, six on the Governing Council, and six in the presidential legacy. As president of SRCD, I effected several initiatives; for example, I relocated Society headquarters to Washington, DC, instituted a Science Directorate, revamped the structure of the biennial meeting, and initiated the Rapid Response protocol. I have also served on the executive committees of the ISSBD and ICIS.Footnote ³

Opportunities and Impediments

As recounted above, I developed a consortium of colleagues in a variety of different cultures worldwide to undertake parallel cross-cultural developmental science. When I organized that group, I was able to visit locations or bring colleagues and their students to my NICHD laboratory for training. Given a common protocol and not unlimited funds, I developed a hub-and-spoke structure to that research. That meant that I became close colleagues with each of my international collaborators, but they never came to know one another as closely. However productive that work has been, I frankly erred in its organization as individual collaborators stayed or left the consortium. Consequently, when a younger colleague of mine began to organize a comparable international research effort and invited me onto her Executive Committee, I advised her to build into her grant “moveable feasts” – meetings of all country principal investigators that would rotate yearly through different host countries. The success of this alternative approach has been noteworthy: after fifteen years of longitudinal research and scores of scientific publications, not one of the principal investigators from nine countries has left the group. We know one another well, do not let one another down, and are comfortable with one another whenever and wherever we dine together.

Future Directions: Knowns and Unknowns

One known: psychology has historically been occupied with disorders, deficits, and disabilities. However, policymakers, educators, practitioners, and parents alike are increasingly turning to developmental scientists to provide evidence-based research on how best to promote and support positive parenting and positive development in children. One unknown: artificial intelligence (AI) has been a presence in science for decades, but in slowly developing and mostly esoteric forms. As I write in the summer of 2023, generative AI has burst into everyday life in myriad ways. There is simply no telling how AI will penetrate and shape the future of developmental science, but it surely will. On these two accounts, the next generation needs to advance a positive developmental science and prepare itself to understand and exploit AI productively as well as guard against its potential nefarious and insidious misuse.