I was born in Birmingham, Alabama, notoriously known as “Bombingham” because of the high incidence of bombings in the city used to intimidate activists who challenged racial segregation during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. I came of age in Alabama during the late 1960s when African Americans’ enduring struggle against racism eventuated in seismic institutional and social change. America’s legalized racial caste system had been weakened by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that outlawed discriminatory practices and banned racial segregation in public schools and other public spaces, although its de facto tentacles remained taut and ubiquitous (and Alabama’s storied resistance to racial justice lives on). Racial barriers in higher education were easing. African Americans, especially youth, were making daring forays into spaces previously reserved for Whites, rejecting Eurocentric beauty standards, proclaiming “Black is beautiful,” celebrating their African heritage, and calling out parallels between structural racism in the USA and colonialism and economic exploitation in Africa.

These institutional and social changes shaped not only my identity, educational trajectory, and intellectual pursuits. They also influenced psychology and developmental science as academic disciplines through their impact on the racial composition of doctoral programs and the perspectives that gained ascendance. In what follows, I situate my experiences, reflections, and contributions as a scholar in developmental science within this broader sociohistorical context.Footnote ¹

My Pathway to Developmental Science

My interest in developmental psychology began as an undergraduate psychology major at Talladega College (1967–71), Alabama’s oldest, historically Black, private liberal arts college. I recall being captivated by evidence of age-related changes in children’s cognitive capacities and the research methods psychologists used to document these changes. My first research project involved surveying African American children and their mothers about various topics related to literacy during their visits to the community library on campus. (Until the early 1970s, they were barred from the town’s public library.)

Transforming my nascent interest in children’s development into a career as a developmental scientist was not a case of serial serendipity, but rather the result of socialization experiences in combination with race-conscious institutional practices that expanded educational opportunities.I have vivid childhood memories of my father, a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and my mother, an elementary school teacher, continually extolling education as a hedge against economic hardship and the indignities of Jim Crow. Helping extended family members attend college was one of many expressions of their strong value for education. As an undergraduate, I was awarded a scholarship to take lecture courses and research practica at Harvard University during an eight-week summer program in 1969, and again in 1970. I was also awarded a scholarship from the Institute of International Education that took me to London, UK, to study psychology for a semester in 1969. These educational programs, conceived as affirmative action was taking hold, helped propel me to graduate school. They also prompted deeper reflections about the intersecting role of race, social class, skin color, culture, regionalism, and accents in the creation and maintenance of social hierarchies that influence experiences and life outcomes. The culture of Talladega College also encouraged my pursuit of graduate study. For much of its history, Talladega stood out among Black colleges for its academic rigor, its high percentage of graduates who subsequently achieved PhDs and medical doctorates, and a curriculum reflecting progressive liberal arts intellectualism (Butler, 1977).

I was ecstatic to be accepted for graduate study in psychology at the University of Michigan (U-M) in Fall 1971. Its stellar reputation was probably amplified subjectively because Herman H. Long, an African American scholar in race relations and President of Talladega College during my time there, received his PhD in educational psychology from U-M, and because U-M was the faculty home of Wilbert McKeachie, the co-author of my first textbook in psychology. Although I had a strong academic record, I believe that my admission to U-M was due in large measure to institutional change fomented by bold activism during this period. In the wake of a ten-day strike in the spring of 1970 provoked by the low percentage of African American students and faculty at U-M, the Black Student Psychological Association (BSPA) escalated its efforts to increase the number of African Americans in the Psychology Department. BSPA representatives reviewed my application, interviewed me by telephone, and subsequently recommended me for admission. BSPA has continued to play a significant role in the recruitment of African Americans to U-M’s graduate program in psychology, although the nature of its involvement has changed over time.

The Early Years: Intrinsic Motivation, Children’s Play, and Critiques of Developmental Science

I recall my four years in graduate school as a period of exciting intellectual discovery, intense study, and new, invigorating cultural experiences (e.g., jazz clubs in Detroit, Detroit’s Shrine of the Black Madonna cultural center and bookstore, Lebanese and Greek restaurants). I remain thankful for the routines and experiences that lessened the stressors of completing a rigorous graduate program and being Black in an affluent college town with few African Americans (e.g., returning to my office at the Institute for Social Research in the evenings to write alongside other Black graduate students; BSPA’s study groups, community service projects, and social gatherings).

I had terrific faculty mentors who gave generous support and astute professional advice during and after graduate school (i.e., Patricia Gurin, Harold Stevenson, John Hagen, Betty Morrison). However, I was never a member of a research lab or a trainee of a specific faculty member. This was not particularly atypical in the department during the 1970s, especially among African American students, as students were encouraged to cultivate their own research ideas, while relying on faculty for guidance in refining and testing those ideas. I believe this training model had both advantages and disadvantages in my case. It probably made me less apprehensive than I otherwise would have been about venturing into new areas of research that I found interesting. But it probably also increased the amount of time it took to get my bearings and establish a sound program of research as an assistant professor, a circumstance that created considerable anxiety because the tenure clock was ticking.

Captivating Ideas. Early in graduate school, I became interested in the concept of intrinsic motivation and questions about why individuals engage in activities for which they receive no identifiable rewards except the pleasure of engagement. I found inspiration in the writings of Robert White and J. McVicker Hunt, both critics of orthodox approaches to motivation premised on the idea that behavior is instigated solely by primary or secondary drives. They drew from Piaget’s observations to formulate ideas about the epigenesis of intrinsic and competence motivation. Although I received my doctorate in developmental psychology, a substantial part of my training and interaction at Michigan was with faculty and students in the social psychology area. One particularly memorable and intellectually engaging course, taught by social psychologists, focused on social-structural factors as influences on socialization and personality. It introduced me to cross-cultural studies on socialization and divergent socialization themes in anthropology and psychology, and helped shape the broad context-focused perspective that would later characterize much of my research and writings.

My dissertation research, which consisted of an experiment to test the counterintuitive hypothesis that extrinsic rewards decrease intrinsic motivation to engage in an activity, drew on Joseph Veroff’s achievement taxonomy, Bem’s self-perception theory, and de Charms’ ideas on personal causation. Veroff chaired the committee, which included two additional social psychologists (Patricia Gurin, Richard Nesbitt), a developmental psychologist (Harold Stevenson), and an educational psychologist (Betty Morrison).

Offensive Ideas. As a graduate student at Michigan and an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, I was acutely aware and exasperated that research on African American children was sparse, hewed to a deficit and race-comparative perspective, and invoked “culture” only as a generic type of deprivation that suffused and undermined African American children’s development. Criticism of the deficit and race-comparative paradigm gained ascendance during the 1970s. The most searing ones were published in edited volumes (e.g., Reginald Jones’ Black Psychology, 1972) and came from African American scholars with doctorates in clinical, educational, and community psychology. Their critiques generally held sway among African Americans in doctoral programs across all areas of psychology, whose numbers in the 1970s and 1980s were sufficiently large to constitute a cohort (Holliday, 2009). It also helped that they were men and had leadership roles in the Association of Black Psychologists, established in 1968, and BSPA, established in 1969.

The critics detailed what is now a well-known and largely uncontested litany of reasons that the race-comparative paradigm is or can be problematic (e.g., underpins and nurtures the deficit model because race differences invariably are interpreted as evidence of deficiencies in African American children, draws attention away from sources of within-group variation among African Americans). Detractors of the deficit, race-comparative model argued for prioritizing the study of normative development in Black children and the study of African American culture, racism, and various social issues in relation to psychological and behavioral processes (Myers et al., 1979; Ogbu, 1981).

Responding to the Paucity and Critiques of Research about African American Children’s Development. Several years after I received my PhD, I shifted from studying influences on intrinsic motivation (McLoyd, 1979) to questions about how contextual factors manipulated in laboratory settings interacted with children’s age to influence sociodramatic play. I also focused on questions about the extent to which spontaneous fantastic versus anticipatory roles differed in the cognitive and social skills they evoked. Virtually all the studies were conducted with low-income, primarily African American children (e.g., McLoyd, 1980, 1983). The shift in focus from intrinsic motivation to children’s play seemed natural to me because I viewed the latter as a quintessential expression of the former.

The ideas of scholars such as Piaget, Vygotsky, El’konin, and Catherine Garvey, and empirical research based on European and White American children influenced my thinking about intrinsic motivation and children’s play. However, I was not inclined to conduct race-comparative studies. In addition to having no compelling rationale to do so – theoretical or otherwise – the critiques of the race-comparative paradigm resonated with me. I assumed that because the relationships and processes I was investigating were universal or unrelated to race or social class, I could study these issues in a sample of Black children without reference to their White counterparts, while also mitigating the paucity of research on Black children. I did not view these goals as incompatible. However, not having a White comparison group was among the reasons that some of my manuscripts were rejected for publication. Some of my most creative work on children’s play was done during an eighteen-month period (1981–82) when I was a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford, supported by fellowships from Stanford and the Ford Foundation (e.g., McLoyd, Thomas, & Warren, 1984; McLoyd, Warren, Thomas, 1984). I had transcriptions of the videotaped speech and behavior of triads of African American preschoolers engaged in play and wanted to learn how to conduct sequential analysis of the transcribed data to characterize and identify predictors of the dynamics of social organization in triads of girls and boys. Ewart Thomas, a Guyanese professor in cognitive and mathematical psychology who had moved from U-M to Stanford, had expertise in this area and graciously agreed to serve as my postdoc mentor. Children’s play remains a vibrant area of study centered around its role in the development of social cognition, social skills, language, executive function, and emotional regulation.

I hoped that highlighting the problems of the deficit and race-comparative paradigm to a broader audience of scholars in the field of child development would help counter its hegemony and make way for research addressing questions of the kind advocated by critics of the race-comparative paradigm. With these goals in mind, my colleagues and I published papers in mainstream journals in human development that spotlighted the importance of cultural and interpretative validity and described patterns in quantitative research on African American children (McLoyd & Randolph, 1984, 1985; Washington & McLoyd, 1982). Our content analyses of empirical studies published in human development journals pointed to methodological and conceptual weaknesses common in race-comparative studies (e.g., confounding of race and social class, lack of clear or compelling rationales for race-comparisons), but also improvements over time in the quality and conceptual underpinnings of studies. This work was prologue to a 1998 volume that Larry Steinberg and I edited on conceptual, methodological, and theoretical issues in the study of ethnic minority adolescents. Years later, as a professor at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill I received a five-year training grant (2005–2010) from NICHDFootnote ² focused on theory and methods in behavioral research with African American children and families.

Transformations in the Study of African American Children’s Development

I am gratified by changes in the study of development in African American children and adolescents that have occurred over the course of my career. The volume of research has burgeoned, resulting in a remarkable accumulation of knowledge that was unimaginable during the early years of my career (e.g., the developmental course of racial identity and its relation to various outcomes; the nature and determinants of African American parents’ racial socialization and child outcomes associated with different types of parental racial socialization). Edited volumes and other work published in the mid 1980s drew attention to emerging conceptual work and programs of research on African American children. The year 1990 marked the publication of a special issue in Child Development, a premier journal in developmental science, that brought together an unprecedented and broad-ranging collection of original research studies and review articles focused on development in ethnic minority children (a majority of which focused on African American children exclusively or in conjunction with children from other racial/ethnic groups) (Spencer & McLoyd, 1990). I believe the special issue lent legitimacy to studying ethnic minority children in their own right, advanced a cultural-variant perspective in understanding African American children’s development, and further discredited the deficit perspective (McLoyd, 2006).

Since that time, several special issues devoted to either research on African American and ethnic minority youth or research on topics of special relevance to them (e.g., racial/ethnic discrimination) have appeared in leading, peer-review journals. Recent analyses of empirical articles published between 1974 and 2018 in top-tier developmental psychology journals indicate that the proportion of articles highlighting race increased markedly between the 1970s and the 2010s (Roberts et al., 2020). Changes have also occurred in the characteristics and paradigms that typify research on African American children’s development. Deficit models have waned in standing and pervasiveness, supplanted by ecological perspectives centered around questions of how environmental demands and circumstances shape proximal processes and development (e.g., Garcia Coll et al., 1996; Spencer, 2006). There is less fixation on race differences. Including race as part of a research design or studying a research sample that is racially balanced is likely to be predicated on a desire to determine whether similar processes or patterns of relationships hold across racial groups, rather than to document race differences in levels of variables. Studies focused exclusively on African American children and on sources of within-race heterogeneity are more common. Concentration on problem behavior has been offset by attention to competence, positive development, and resilience. Longitudinal research has increased, and a number of high-profile research programs focused on African American children and families provide examples of best practices in terms of research methods (e.g., using focus groups drawn from communities representing the research sample to tag items in research instruments that are culturally insensitive, intrusive, or unclear).

Some of these trends in scholarship can be traced to institutional changes. With the lowering of racial barriers in higher education in the late 1960s, we witnessed strong growth during subsequent decades in the number of African Americans and persons of color with doctorates in developmental psychology and human development. Moreover, the proportion of publications in developmental psychology (as reflected in Child Development and Developmental Psychology) written by first authors who were persons of color increased sharply between the 1970s and the 2010s (Roberts et al., 2020). In addition to railing against the hegemony of deficit models, many of these individuals played major roles in increasing the participation of scholars of color in the leadership and editorial activities of professional organizations focused on developmental science, for example, Society for Research in Child Development, Society for Research on Adolescence (Harrison-Hale, 2006; McLoyd, 2006).

These shifts are notable in part because they influence what is published in premier journals in psychological science. Recent analyses indicate that when Editors-in-Chief (EICs) of top-tier psychology journals were persons of color, the proportion of articles that highlighted race was almost triple the rate seen when EICs were White. This variation is correlated with the racial/ethnic makeup of editorial board members (Roberts et al., 2020). In another example of the benefits of increased racial and ethnic diversity to developmental science, the first person of color who served as Editor-in-Chief of Child Development, Cynthia Garcia Coll, implemented a policy requiring authors to provide specific sociocultural information about the children, families, and communities in their studies. Such information can advance developmental science by encouraging questions about external and ecological validity, providing perspective about the replicability of findings, and serving as a constant reminder about the need to study children and families of color and to extend our knowledge base beyond WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic) samples.

The developments mentioned here are cause for celebration, but it is important not to lose sight of shortcomings that persist. Much of the research about development in African American children arguably is outside of the mainstream of developmental science, as most is published in specialty journals, special issues of journals, or special sections of journal issues. Publication of research on African American and ethnic minority children in premier journals should be the norm, rather than depend on the creation of special journal issues or sections, as the latter reinforce the idea that this knowledge, and diversity more broadly, is not mainstream (Roberts et al., 2020). Critics have also lamented the tacit colorblind ideology of developmental science that works to maintain the invisibility of marginalized racial/ethnic perspectives and its general failure to contextualize individual-level behavior within overlapping systems of oppression and privilege (Syed et al., 2018).

The Later Years: Poverty, Family Processes, and Children’s Socioemotional Adjustment

By the mid 1980s, I had turned my attention to understanding economic stress and the family- and neighborhood-level processes through which it affected children’s socioemotional adjustment (McLoyd, 1989, Reference McLoyd, Damon, Sigel and Renninger1998). I was keenly aware of the stark and enduring links between race, class, and income, so although this was a new content area for me, it dovetailed with my interest in African American children’s development. After all, the processes that reified “race” as a biological concept and created and maintained racial inequities in the USA were themselves borne of economic exploitation (e.g., slavery, sharecropping, Jim Crow). The 1980–1982 economic recession, the worst since the Depression of the 1930s, ravaged the State of Michigan and prompted myriad questions in response to the steady drumbeat of stories in the Detroit-Ann Arbor media chronicling how economic stress was upending family life. I waded into this new area of research with some trepidation, but fortunately received a five-year Faculty Scholars Award from the William T. Grant Foundation that enabled me to acquire new methodological skills and devote more time to research.

Child poverty increased sharply during the recession and remained stubbornly high through 1993 (around 20%), precipitating a wave of research on poverty and children. Two models dominated research devoted to identifying processes that mediated the effects of income poverty on child well-being. The investment model emphasizes income as a resource that enables families to invest in their children’s human capital by procuring materials (e.g., educational materials), experiences (e.g., tutoring), and services that benefit the child’s development. The family stress model emphasizes links between income, parental psychological distress, and parenting, and hypothesizes that economic hardship adversely affects child well-being through its negative effects on parents’ mental health, which in turn, underlines the quality of parenting (e.g., more punitive, inconsistent discipline; less nurturance and support).

Extensions of the Family Stress Model. The family stress model derives from Glen Elder’s seminal study of the effects of parental job and income loss during the Great Depression on family functioning and children’s development. Elder’s work focused on how families coped with the shock of economic loss, but I could see its relevance for understanding how poverty and economic hardship as ongoing conditions affected dynamics in African American families and ultimately children’s socioemotional development. My extensions of the model included hypotheses about role modelling and emotional, informational, and parenting support as moderators of theorized links between economic hardship, parental psychological distress, and parenting quality, as well as hypotheses about the mediating effects of children’s perception of economic hardship and appraisal of the quality of relations with their mother (McLoyd, Reference McLoyd1990; McLoyd et al., Reference McLoyd, Jayaratne, Ceballo and Borquez1994). In keeping with Bronfenbrenner’s ecological perspective, I situated hypothesized proximal processes within processes operating at the exosystem and macrosystem level (e.g., historical and contemporary racism, public policy, and practice).

Deborah Belle’s edited book, Lives in Stress: Women and Depression, stood out for its profound insights and sensitive analyses of how economic stress influenced maternal mental health and parenting. The studies of Greg Duncan, Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, and their colleagues provided essential background for my conceptual and review papers. Their pathbreaking longitudinal work documented walloping race differences in the dynamics, duration, and context of childhood poverty and showed how these dimensions of poverty were linked to children’s developmental outcomes.

I was fortunate to work with Rand Conger and his colleagues at Iowa State University and stellar graduate students and postdocs at Michigan, the University of North Carolina and the University of Texas-Austin to test variants of the family stress model. We found support for most of the hypothesized links in families from diverse racial/ethnic backgrounds, in two-parent and single-parent families, in families living in rural and urban contexts, and across child gender and age (e.g., Mistry et al., 2002; McLoyd et al., Reference McLoyd, Jayaratne, Ceballo and Borquez1994; Gard et al., Reference Gard, McLoyd, Mitchell and Hyde2020). It is now clear that the family stress model better accounts for income effects on children’s socioemotional functioning, whereas income effects on children’s cognitive functioning are better explained by an investment model. Undoubtedly, there are pathways other than these two family-based pathways through which poverty can undermine children’s development.

We also conducted research suggesting that neighborhood and housing problems associated with poverty have indirect implications for adolescent psychosocial functioning through their influence on mothers’ mental health and parenting behavior (Gutman et al., 2005; Jocson & McLoyd, 2015). Among our most distressing findings was that the benefits of social support on parenting diminished in neighborhoods beset with a higher prevalence of poverty and crime (Ceballo & McLoyd, Reference Ceballo and McLoyd2002). In other work, we found that school connectedness protected low-income children against low levels of support in the home and neighborhood, but protective effects against exposure to community or domestic violence, when they existed, were very modest (Goetschius et al., 2021; Hardaway et al., 2012). Collectively, our studies showed that the “riskier” the setting, the less likely we were to find protective effects and the less potent positive factors were in mitigating negative effects.

Social Policy Work. The capstone of my research career is my work as a member of interdisciplinary teams of researchers evaluating the effectiveness of anti-poverty policies and practices. In the late 1990s I collaborated with Greg Duncan, Aletha Huston, and others in the evaluation of the longitudinal effects on children and their parents of New Hope, a three-year, employment-based, anti-poverty program with random assignment (e.g., McLoyd et al., Reference McLoyd, Kaplan, Purtell and Huston2011). I have also been a member of two National Academy of Sciences consensus committees. The first committee identified evidence-based programs and policies for reducing the number of children living in poverty in the USA by half within ten years. The committee’s report, A Roadmap to Reducing Child Poverty (Duncan & Le Menestrel, Eds., 2019), highlighted findings from quasi- and natural experiments and figured prominently in the anti-poverty legislation that President Biden signed into law in 2021 (i.e., American Rescue Plan).

A subsequent committee focused on reducing intergenerational poverty. Its most important contributions are extensive analyses of the historical roots and contemporary drivers of racial disparities in intergenerational mobility and a compilation of policies and programs shown to be effective in reducing intergenerational poverty specifically among Black and Latino children (i.e., increasing upward mobility out of a low-income childhood). (Reducing Intergenerational Poverty, Duncan, Gootman, & Nalamada, Eds., 2023). For someone committed to eliminating childhood poverty in the US, these experiences underscored the value of research designs that enable us to make the strongest possible case for causality, though identifying causal mechanisms is only one of many valuable research priorities. They also underlined the importance of studying factors that are more “regulatable” through policies and practices, and the advantages of multiple perspectives, methods, and levels of analysis in the formulation of policy.

New Directions in Research on Childhood Poverty and Adversity. Among the most exciting current research approaches are brain imaging studies seeking to determine if and how economic stress and early adversity “get under the skin” to affect children’s socioemotional and cognitive outcomes. A related line of work focuses on links between poverty-related adversities and physiological reactivity. Interesting findings include evidence that parental support and positive parenting can influence children’s development of physiological stress regulation and prevent elevations in cortisol in the presence of stress (Gunnar, 2020).

Advice for Future Generations

It is presumptuous to offer advice to future generations of scholars in developmental science based on my experiences, partly because the contexts and historical periods within which my academic and intellectual journey has occurred are unique in many ways. That said, behaviors and orientations that I believe can stand one in good stead throughout a career in developmental science include: finding strategies to sustain curiosity and enthusiasm; undertaking risky forays to satisfy and invigorate intellectual curiosity, while mitigating the costs as much as possible; cultivating a critical and anti-racist perspective about the field and where it is headed; reading broadly across psychology and other disciplines; showing genuine appreciation for the contributions of others to your research pursuits and professional development; being educated about best practices for successful mentoring and research collaborations and trying to adhere to them; having the courage to move to a different and more satisfying work environment when a person-environment mismatch is too costly psychologically; being clear-eyed about your strengths and weaknesses and making choices and adjustments in light of that self-knowledge; achieving clarity about your short- and long-term goals for family life and making professional decisions that align with those goals; and cultivating interests, hobbies and self-care routines to enhance life satisfaction and check the absorptive nature and stress of academic life.