As developmental scholars, we are always warned about the fallibility of retrospective research designs. Yet, autobiographies are the epitome of looking backwards; narratives are smoothed, inconvenient events, or those not feeding the storyline, are edited out. Mistakes, or more likely, research dead-ends are forgotten. And God only knows how much is misremembered, reframed, or blurred (cognitive psychologists study these topics). And all this occurs before factoring in emotional responses to life events.

In my case, my multiple, some might say eclectic, research interests beg for threads of continuity, an ex post facto “meaning-making.” Those who study development over the lifespan, like many represented in this volume, may be especially susceptible to weaving a coherent story. Like each contributor, I arrived at the doorstep of developmental psychology with a set of a priori facts – personality characteristics, family situation, community context, zeitgeist of the era, and relationships – all tightly wrapped around each other.

I am a child of the post-World War II era of American prosperity, hope, and intergenerational mobility. I was the first of the Baby Boomer cohort, born to officers at the Bethesda Naval Hospital. My mother, who was in the first cohort of Navy women (called WAVES at that time), was a decoder in Washington, mapping the movements of ships. (She spent most of her time in what was called the doghouse, trying to decipher messages sent incorrectly.) My father was a decorated flyboy from the Pacific theater, ending his time as the Defense Secretary’s pilot. They returned to Western Michigan to raise four children. Along the way I learned useful skills from them. Conducting research – really a form of decoding confusing error-filled messages – and raising money to do and continue longitudinal research to the tune of millions of dollars, akin to flying at twenty-five feet over the water and not blinking. (I never totally panicked when flying “on the deck” or when presenting to funders, but sometimes came close.)

In 1965 I headed East to a women’s college, which was a revelation – female professors who were brilliant, young women whose ideas were taken seriously, and professors dedicated to their field of study and wanting their students to be as well. I fell in love with psychology as a sophomore and with developmental research as a senior; and that was it. Connecticut College’s psychology department was rigorous, nurturing, and exciting. My research mentor was Eleanor Rosch (Heider), who was at Connecticut College a short while before decamping to Berkeley.

While I had applied to a few doctoral programs directly from undergraduate life, I decided to get a master’s degree first at Harvard. I spent an idyllic year taking courses with some of my academic heroes – Tom Pettigrew, Bea Whiting, Larry Kohlberg, Roger Brown, and Erik Erikson. Perhaps an eclectic offering, but for my nascent interests in prejudice/discrimination (and remedies for their existence), lifespan development, observation of children and families, and social cognition, it was perfect.

I then went to the University of Pennsylvania (Penn), enrolling in a doctoral program in human learning and development, separate from the department of psychology and in a different graduate school. In retrospect, the decision to obtain a PhD in the former turned out to be fortuitous given my interest in how social contexts and structures constrain children’s development and how interventions and programs can alter child and family trajectories. In essence, I discovered that developmental theory and practice do not have to be separate – there is nothing as practical as good theory.

From my time at Penn, three experiences stand out. The most momentous was meeting Michael Lewis who was teaching a doctoral course in developmental psychology. To conduct my thesis research, I moved to Educational Testing Service (ETS) in Princeton where he was a senior research scientist. My thesis was on early social cognition and the acquisition of self.

The second Penn moment involved the beginning of the university’s women’s study program. I met like-minded academics from various departments. All of us were concerned about discrimination against women in academia and beyond, as well as the often seemingly egregious underrepresentation of women in research as both authors and participants. Many of us had gone to undergraduate women’s colleges and had been brought up (academically) experiencing gender equality. Teaching a course on the psychology of women, I became interested in female development, specifically the ways in which reproductive and social development co-occur (or may collide).

The third Penn influence was being, briefly, an RA (Research Assistant) for Sandra Scarr. I was especially taken with her work in the Philadelphia school system examining whether hereditability estimates on test scores were truncated for children from poorer families, a social-class-by-hereditability interaction. (This finding was later replicated with more precise data than those available in the late 1970s, although it may not be true in most recent cohorts … a developmental context story in itself.) The idea, however, that development could be constrained or enhanced by social factors really spoke to me. (I had spent part of the 1967 summer in a Head Start center where I clearly saw class and race constraints.) More generally, the intersection of context and person characteristics seemed to me an accurate representation of the overall developmental course. Also, Scarr was doing an intervention with low-birth-weight babies, testing the idea that some person-level constraints (in this case, biological) can be partially overcome. These themes appear repeatedly in my research – evaluations of multisite early intervention programs, a focus on children with biological constraints (low birth weight as the prime example), and contextual constraints (low parental education, low family income, poor neighborhood conditions, violence in the home, school, or neighborhood, and substandard housing), and analyses of gene-context interactions in the Future of Families birth cohort.Footnote ¹

I decided to stay at ETS when offered a research scientist position (1965). My interests coalesced into three or four topics (depending on how distinct two are or whether interactions among research lines led to something new or were the inevitable blending of topics in interesting ways). These can be categorized as reproductive events (puberty, adolescent sexual behavior, and teenage pregnancy), research-focused policy (early intervention for biologically or environmentally at-risk young children and their parents, links between maternal work in the first year of life and children’s development), and developmental consequences of biological and environmental conditions.

The first – reproductive transitions – started with meeting several scholars with different training and perspectives from mine (but clearly compatible enough to collaborate). Diane Ruble and I met in Princeton University (where she was an assistant professor and I was teaching a course on sex roles). Both of us were interested in menarche and menstruation (especially perceptions of symptoms through a social cognitive lens) and did a series of cross-sectional and longitudinal studies together (including one where we called girls every eight weeks so that we could interview them right after menarche). Having met at a conference on gender, Anne Petersen and I convened scholars studying pubertal processes and perceptions of these changes (the resulting first edited volume about girls at puberty was reviewed in Science), as well as running numerous other conferences and journals on this topic. Endocrinologist Michelle Warren of Columbia University and I, introduced by a pediatrician, initiated longitudinal studies of hormones, context, and adolescent behavior (another decades-long collaboration). Sociologist Frank Furstenberg of the University of Pennsylvania invited me to work with him on a seventeen-year follow-up of his cohort of teenage mothers from Baltimore after a chance meeting at an Aspen Institute/Social Science Research Council (SSRC) meeting on adolescence. Following these mothers into mid-life expanded my work from childhood and adolescence into adulthood (although my initial focus was on the children of the teenage mothers who were now adolescents themselves).

The second overall thread – research approaches to policy – began with two early intervention programs. The first was the ETS Study of Head Start, conducted in three low-income communities in the early 1970s. Decades later, I would do a series of analyses with Columbia University colleagues, using the first (and still only) multisite randomized trial of Head Start attendance. Amazingly, findings were quite similar.

The third thread – developmental consequences of biological and environmental circumstances – began through an introduction to Marie McCormick, a pediatrician and public health epidemiologist at the University of Pennsylvania. She invited me to join an ongoing follow-up of a large sample of low-birth-weight babies who were in elementary school, which of course I did (as a low-birth-weight baby myself and having been impressed by Scarr’s low-birth-weight baby intervention program). Thereafter, we collaborated on two interventions. One was the eight-site Infant Health and Development Program for low-birth-weight infants (IHDP) that involved home visiting for the first three years of life and center-based care based on the Abecedarian Program Craig Ramey had pioneered in Chapel Hill, NC. Involved with Robert Wood Johnson Foundation senior staff from the very beginning, McCormick and I had the most rewarding experience, working on the design evaluation through the three years of the program (we were the young ones in a sea of endowed professors in major research universities), and ending with the two of us running the follow-ups at five, six-and-a-half, eight, and eighteen years of age.

The fourth research thread was an amalgam of all three. McCormick and I collaborated on an intervention focused on getting pregnant women into prenatal care early using an outreach model. My time spent with the Harlem Hospital staff was a deep dive into class- and race-based beliefs, as well as the necessity of spending a lot of time in a specific community to understand anything about it (something my ethnographic colleagues had been saying for years and of course are still saying). This experience influenced how I train my graduate students at Columbia – no one can do effective research without spending time in a low-income community. Spending time with large data sets is great but is no substitute for experiences with real mothers and children. Financial insecurity cannot be understood without talking with families about their lives and struggles to make ends meet.

In 1990, life changed dramatically. My husband started his own consulting firm, I accepted a job offer from Columbia University, and most importantly, we became parents. Talk about life event overload! At least we didn’t sell our house (although we did take a Columbia apartment, which in New York City is the first negotiation item in academia [over and above lab space]!). I was torn about moving, since my developmental policy-focused research life at ETS was so great. However, the offer was so tempting – an endowed chair, a policy center, and fabulous space in their graduate school of education (Teachers College). Not to mention my already existing links to the medical school and the opportunity to train graduate students.

Policy-Focused Research

Being in a university with graduate schools in education, medicine, public health, journalism, and social work as well as arts and sciences was perfect for me. Over the first several years I had made friendships and started collaborations across the university. Sheila Kamerman (Social Work), Larry Aber (Public Health), and I (Education and Pediatrics) started a child and family policy consortium at Columbia with the encouragement of the President (Lee Bolinger). The three of us taught a doctoral seminar that offered credit in all three graduate schools. It was the most fun and stimulating course I have ever taught. We engaged on cross-training of doctoral students in the different graduate schools which fit with my already emergent interdisciplinary bent (having collaborated with scholars in education, sociology, pediatrics, public health, and gynecology). We hosted meetings and small conferences with scholars doing research on children and families across the university. We advocated for policy-focused research. At the time, I do not think any other university had such strong interdisciplinary and intercollege ties with a focus on children and families. Our approach became instantiated by a Population Research Center grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

About three years after I had moved, Lynn Kagan was recruited to Teachers College as well. Our interests in child and family policy in general and early childhood intervention, in particular, were a match made in heaven (complementary yet different). She joined me in running the Center (now the National Center for Children and Families). We emphasized then (and still do) the nexus of practice, policy, and research in the service of families and children. We cross-train our graduate students in approaches to policy and research through the projects undertaken by the Center. In addition to acquiring academic positions, many of our former students are in policy positions in foundations, the federal government, policy research firms, and state government. We have offered fellowships with not-for-profit organizations and local government to cohorts of students for decades over the summers. (Thank you, William T. Grant Foundation and the Foundation for Child Development for funding, and SRCDFootnote ² for co-sponsoring.) Most recently, several foundations have provided start-up funds and technical assistance to seven colleges and universities to implement our model of training and, in a sense, our Center. (Kagan gets the most credit for making this happen.) A wonderful legacy for us both.

Early Intervention Strategies

My commitment to understanding how various intervention strategies might enhance children’s well-being grew. The Infant Health and Development Program (IHDP) was initiated in the mid 1980s. We continued to follow the low-birth-weight infants through to age eighteen.

With Mathematica Policy Research (MPR), I conducted an evaluation of the efficacy of a new Department of Health and Human Services program – Early Head Start. This was a large evaluation – a seventeen-site randomized trial of home visiting and center-based services offered to low-income pregnant women through the baby’s third year. The evaluation was unique in that we (the national evaluators) were tasked to work with all seventeen-site program and research directors to design and carry out the project. It was a joy to implement this model (thanks to the leadership of John Love, Helen Raikes, Rachel Chazan Cohen, and Louise Turullo, and all the research directors).

The Neighborhoods in Which Families Live

Theorizing by William Julius Wilson and Urie Bronfenbrenner (two of my research heroes) pointed to neighborhoods as an organizing feature, and one that unfortunately is highly segregated by class and race in the US. The Social Science Research Council (SSRC) convened a multidisciplinary group of scholars to think about neighborhoods, families, and children. From the fantastic collection of scholars emerged two edited volumes on this topic, edited by Duncan, Aber, and me. What was key in this collective work was the fact that investigators added geo-coded census data to their extant longitudinal data sets, which allowed us to consider a similar set of neighborhood characteristics. We struggled with various ways to describe neighborhoods, using factor analyses, non-linear analyses, and participant self-reports but focusing on the census tract level.

The interactions with scholars in the SSRC neighborhood group and in the NICHD network on child well-being resulted in thoughts about how to design a study which captures neighborhood effects even given all the difficulties in defining neighborhoods, how to separate effects of the neighborhood from family effects (I could not wrap my head around adding in school effects!), how to account for changes in neighborhoods over time and demographic-linked patterns of moving between neighborhoods, and how to factor in class and race constraints in neighborhood choice. Even though Tama Leventhal and I had framed a 1984 Psychological Bulletin article around possible models which might explain changes in neighborhood effects over the lifespan, I still see these issues as a never-ending challenge. All the research that I have done just chips away at the edges. Maybe this is true of all developmental research, though; theory and data limitations are always colliding.

My interests in neighborhoods deepened through a series of research opportunities. The first was an invitation to join the group running the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods (PHDCN). Again, the investigators were all from different disciplines (and for me, new disciplines) – Rob Sampson (criminologist), Tony Earls (child psychiatrist), and Steve Raudenbush (statistical educational methodologist if that field exists beyond Steve). With funding from the MacArthur Foundation, they had formed a network to undertake a daunting longitudinal research project which would, if implemented, render it possible to separate neighborhood and family influences. Basically, to account for the embedding of individuals within families within neighborhoods, they had a stratified random sample of Chicago neighborhoods (divided into clusters of census tracts, based on local knowledge and highway placement). Within each selected neighborhood cluster, door-to-door outreach was used to identify households with children aged under one, three, six, nine, twelve, fifteen, and eighteen, with these families seen three times over eight years. A monumental undertaking in and of itself, before adding an adult survey in all neighborhoods, an observation of disorder at the block level (cameras in vans), and interviews with stakeholders in different institutions (police, social service, school, recreation, health, and elected official staff). Our meetings were basically an ongoing seminar (punctuated of course by the usual data collection issues).

The second deepening of my interest in neighborhoods involved opportunities to look at the effects of moving to new neighborhoods, specifically from public housing buildings to either place-based subsidized housing units or to private housing units via vouchers (random assignment in both cases). Yonkers, NY, was the site of the place-based housing evaluation and the NYC (New York City) site of the Moving to Opportunity evaluation was the site of the voucher moves (special vouchers required a move from the inner city where the public housing building were located to neighborhoods with low poverty rates).

The last opportunity involving neighborhoods is an ongoing evaluation of a NYC program offering partially subsidized apartment units to families who have low and modest incomes but are not below the poverty line (i.e., not eligible for public housing). Working with sociologist Elizabeth Gaumer and her team in NYC’s Department of Housing and Preservation Development, we are studying families who entered lotteries to move into thirteen such buildings (so that we have a randomized design of movers and non-movers all of whom applied for a lottery and met income requirements). It seems, then, that I have returned to my father’s interest in class and race-integrated housing.

Family Structure, Income, and Parenting

Frank Furstenberg and I spent a year at the Russell Sage Foundation, when Sara McLanahan (demographics) and Irv Garfinkel (economics, social work) from the University of Wisconsin were also in residence. We were very simpatico, hanging out and discussing child development and family policy. They eventually moved East (to Princeton and Columbia University, respectively). When I moved to Columbia, McLanahan offered me “visitor” space in her Princeton Center (as I was giving up my office at ETS). Gradually we began informally cross-training graduate students from our different disciplines. When McLanahan and Garfinkel began the Fragile Families (now Future of Families) and Child Well-Being Project (along with Ron Mincy who is now also at Columbia), we obviously talked about how to weave child development and parenting into their design. Their project morphed into a twenty-city birth cohort begun in the late 1990s, oversampling unwed mothers (including a sample of married mothers as well) and interviewing the new mothers before they left the hospital and most of the fathers.

The study fit perfectly with McLanahan’s earlier work on single mothers and Garfinkel’s work on child support. My work on infants, parenting behavior, child outcomes over time, low-income families, high-risk neighborhoods, and my familiarity with large data sets (PSID and NLSY) made it a natural collaborative fit. I am still involved with Future of Families – the babies are now in their mid-twenties, and many are becoming parents, which offers an opportunity to look at intergenerational transmission of parenting behavior, human capital, and income. I have looked at a variety of issues using Future of Families. (See our 2021 chapter reviewing what has been done taking a developmental perspective.) The collection of DNA when the children were nine, fifteen, and twenty-three had been particularly gratifying for me, given my nascent but never disappearing interest in person-by-environmental-characteristic interactions.

I envy the next generation of scholars who will enjoy the FF data, as the rate of being able to assay hundreds if not thousands of gene and epigenomic markers is increasing exponentially. Wish that I had another twenty years to look at the data!

Reflections and Regrets

How interesting and how enjoyable it all has been – studying individuals, families, and neighborhoods over time. The tapestry of my research, especially in terms of the winding threads, reminds me of how we construct individual and group profiles over the lifespan. Using an example from some of my research is illustrative. Brandon Wagner and Sarah Gold Pachman (once postdoctoral students at Princeton University) constructed a beautiful graphic of the complexity of mothers’ lives from the time of the birth of a child (Time 1) through the child’s fifteenth year (Time 6). The intermediate ages are one, three, five, and nine. (See Figure 17.1.)

Figure 17.1 Resident mothers’ relationship with partners from the birth of the child to the fifteenth birthday.

These data are from the Future of Families and Child Well-being Study, representing over 3,000 mothers in twenty cities. The graph begins with the mother’s relationship status at birth – married to the father of the child, cohabitating with the father, dating the father, or no longer romantically involved. Wagner and Pachman illustrate both continuity and change in some relations. Some patterns remain constant for some mothers, while others wax and wane. Even others emerge over time. The graphic looks like a tapestry. A nice metaphor for a research career.

Our fearless editor asked each of us to imagine developmental research in the next several decades. Briefly put, I can only hope that developmental approaches incorporate the following three research threads without losing a focus on continuity and change: more ethnographic and person-oriented approaches to studying individuals’ lives; more policy-driven research (often borrowing from economics and somehow balancing experimental and natural history designs); and more systems-oriented biological work (neurological, epigenome, bionome). And I used the term “regret” in the heading only because, via such perspectives, I will not still be helping to tackle fundamental and fascinating issues of human development.