I was born in a village on the outskirts of the northern Dutch city of Groningen in 1944. I was the third child in a farming family. In my entire family, almost every male member became a farmer. So that seemed to be my destiny too.

At the age of six, I went to the local primary school. The schoolteacher was irritated by my disruptive behavior and distracted me by giving me extra assignments. I was forced to go to school early to check the current temperature, precipitation, and wind speed. He taught me to record the data in tables and graphs. When I could read, he regularly sent me to the school library to study a book and to lecture about it in front of the class. Later, when I was eight years old, he solved a logistical problem by using me as an assistant teacher, as he was supposed to teach the third and fourth grade students (eight- and nine-year-olds, respectively) in the same classroom. When he was teaching the fourth-grade students, he would let me teach math to the children in my own (third) grade by whispering the instructions. Sometimes, he would listen and report to me that he did not always understand what I meant, but that the children did. Therefore, at the age of eight, I discovered in practice Vygotsky’s theory of “the zone of proximal development.” In an elementary way, the schoolteacher taught me the skills that I would need later: statistics, presentation, and teaching.

He then convinced my parents that I should not become a farmer and recommended that I attend Teachers College.

Teachers College

However, at Teachers College I was not particularly motivated. I preferred playing bebop on my alto saxophone and played hooky a lot.

In the third year a teacher named A. F. Kalverboer, later a professor of experimental clinical psychology, taught us new subjects: pedagogy, psychology, and didactics. I decided to become an expert in these subjects. Moreover, I realized that I did not have enough musical talent to become the next Charlie Parker! As an attractive alternative I now considered becoming a scholar, specializing in these fields.

I enjoyed the new subjects and Kalverboer also encouraged me to study scientific psychology books, including the works of Professor B. J. Kouwer at Groningen University. Kouwer was a student of the renowned phenomenological psychologist F. J. J. Buytendijk, founder of what in Europe was called the Utrecht School, a group of researchers at Utrecht University who developed phenomenological psychology between 1940 and 1960. They sought to do justice to human subjectivity, which they intended to achieve through the phenomenological method based on the writings of the German philosopher Edmund Husserl.

Kouwer had written a brilliant book on personality psychology that provided a comprehensive description of anything that had ever been thought and written in the Western world about the human person. He made clear how theories of personality were culturally and historically embedded. Inspired by the French existentialists, especially Jean Paul Sartre, Kouwer demonstrated that the object-subject dialectic makes it impossible and undesirable to objectify fellow human beings. This was what Sartre meant by “L’enfer c’est l’autre” (Hell is the other): when the other captures you as a person they restrict your freedom. Kouwer’s critical view on personality theories and research was based on this insight. Ever since reading his book, I rarely or only hesitantly use terms like “character” and “personality.”

After completing Teachers College in 1965, I did not become a teacher, but decided to study psychology at Groningen University, with the intention of getting close to Kouwer.

Academic Psychology Studies

It soon became apparent, however, that academic psychologists no longer accepted the phenomenological method. The main reason was that the method was not leading to objective, replicable, and generalizable data.

Kouwer was convinced by his phenomenological background that the psychologist should try to understand human subjectivity philosophically, but as a researcher he was strictly empirical-analytical. In the 1950s he introduced factor analysis to the Netherlands and wrote computer programs with which we could carry out our data analyses. Although students were not permitted to follow Kouwer’s lectures before the fourth year of the study program, he was my role model from the outset. And as a student, I adopted Kouwer’s two-sided perspective. On the one hand, I took a minor in philosophy for a full year, specializing in Husserl’s phenomenology. On the other, by completing extensive training in programming, using the Algol 64 computer language, I could draw up statistical programs myself.

Given this early background, I remain convinced that the core of psychology is comprised of the dialectic between subject and object. Psychology is a subject of the humanities as well as the sciences. Those, like many today, who want to turn psychology into an exclusively science discipline or, those who see it as a strictly humanities subject – both are stripping psychology of its core. That core consists of the tension between alpha- and beta-disciplines. Psychology is and should be a gamma-discipline.

Developmental Psychology

The first three years of the then six-year psychology doctoral degree program focused on general education (Bildung). Besides introduction to various areas of psychology there were courses in genetics, physiology, ethology, history of philosophy, logic, psychiatry, neurology, sociology, pedagogy, and statistics. After the third year, in my case 1968, the specialization in psychology began. Exactly in that year, however, Professor Kouwer died (at the age of forty-six), which for me was a huge setback.

Initially, I was a student assistant to Kalverboer, my teacher at the Teachers College, who was conducting PhD research with the founding father of developmental neurology, Heinz Prechtl. Prechtl’s group focused on what was then called minimal brain damage (MBD) and later led to the study of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Analyzing the group’s data, I developed mainly as a statistician. After a year, I realized that further development in this field would require immersing myself in neurology much more than I wanted to and thus chose to leave that assistantship.

I went on to study with two of Kouwer’s former PhD students: J. J. van der Werff (developmental psychology) and W. K. B. Hofstee (psychometrics, statistics, and methodology). The newly arrived Professor van der Werff appointed me as a student assistant. Noting that, although his professorship was in developmental psychology, he did not know much about it and suggested that we study together.

In the Netherlands at that time developmental psychology meant child psychology. Moreover, there hardly existed any tradition of research; education was focused on helping children with problems. Van der Werff, however, wanted to turn this field into the scientific discipline of developmental psychology.

Although everyone was talking about Jean Piaget at that point (late 1960s), Van der Werff and I were not drawn to his work. We thought he was an old-fashioned nineteenth-century scholar who had been heavily criticized by several Dutch scholars even before WW2. But because of the new international interest in Piaget in the 1960s we forced ourselves to study his writings. For two years, together with groups of students, we studied Piaget’s French-language publications as well as German and American writings on Piaget (notably John Flavell’s superb book-length “introduction”). We became Piaget experts and came to understand how much he had shaped the field’s thinking about (cognitive) development.

Moreover, the democratization that took place in Groningen University in 1968 (with endless student protests, occupations, and disruptions of the daily order) gave me new opportunities as a student: I could organize study groups and research projects, was permitted to teach, and was involved in administrative tasks. Van der Werff regarded me as a younger colleague: we studied and taught together; and I became secretary of the Department of Developmental Psychology which he chaired. After graduation (cum laude) in 1971, it was a matter of course that I became an assistant professor in Van der Werff’s group.

Normal Science within the Netherlands (1971–1981)

I taught on nearly all levels (Introduction to Developmental Psychology; Methodology of Developmental Research; Social Development; History and Foundations of Developmental Psychology), conducted research, and had quite a few administrative duties.

During this period, Dutch developmental psychology became nationally oriented. Before World War II, Dutch psychology had been focused on Germany, and international publishing was in German. After World War II, my teachers were nationally oriented, published mainly in Dutch journals, and from the end of the 1950s gradually turned to American psychology and began to publish in American and British journals.

There was no national institutional structure; each university placed its own emphases. And research collaboration did not exist. Van der Werff decided to do something about this state of affairs: he founded in 1970 the Dutch Association of Developmental Psychology, and I became its secretary. The Association published a Dutch Journal of Developmental Psychology, of which I was the first editor. A new élan was born, along with the alignment of study programs, exchange of teachers, and cooperation in scientific research across different university departments.

My experimental research during this period focused on Piaget-studied phenomena, such as concepts of conservation, classification, and seriation. Gradually, my interest shifted to social cognition, stimulated by publications by Flavell, Selman, Shantz, and others.

At that time in The Netherlands academic careers were more dependent on teaching competencies than on research output. As secretary of the department, I proposed that those who had concrete plans to write a dissertation be given teaching-free days. That was unanimously rejected by the members of the department. Given the (Marxist-oriented) democratization from the late 1960s on, they wanted to avoid a “meritocracy.” Consequently, while meeting my teaching responsibilities, I had to prepare my own dissertation in my spare time.

This period had several highlights. The first was publication of the Overview of Developmental Psychology (Koops & Van der Werff, Reference Koops and Werff1979), a handbook that helped to change Dutch developmental psychology from a European and practical-problems-focused child psychology into a mainly American-oriented, empirical-analytical research field. The volume was prescribed in psychology at all Dutch-language universities in the Netherlands and Belgium.

Second, I completed my dissertation in 1980. It was a typical Kouwerian dissertation, supervised by two of Kouwer’s former PhD candidates, Professors Van der Werff and Hofstee.

Kouwer’s point of view was that psychology was an “impossible” science since experimental participants are not just objects, but thinking subjects, even with thoughts about the experiments in which they participate. I engaged young children in modeling experiments, like the well-known early Bandura experiments in modeling aggressive behavior of children. In the experimental condition, children were given a mini lecture on modeling theory (a simplified insight into Bandura’s modeling theory); in the control condition, this was absent. After observing the behavior of a model the second group behaved as usual in modeling experiments: all children were influenced by the behavior of the model (according to a normal distribution); the first group apparently made the choice of behaving according to the behavior of the model or behaving contra the model (a bimodal distribution). In all sorts of ways with many controls, I repeated the experiment and kept finding this result. I empirically demonstrated what had preoccupied the phenomenologists (like Kouwer): the human subject is not an object like that in the natural sciences, but rather a subject who can decide to collaborate with the experimenter or not. Incidentally, this work also dovetailed well with that of Rosenthal and Rosnow on Artifacts in Behavioral Research and Orne’s notion of demand characteristics, among others.

A third highlight was the brilliant dissertation by Johannes Kingma, a PhD candidate supervised by Van der Werff and me. He graduated in 1981 with a neo-Piagetian thesis on the development of quantitative and relational concepts of children four to twelve years old. Kingma received a travel grant from the Dutch Research Council and moved to Canada to join Charles Brainerd’s group, at that time at the University of Western Ontario. He and I published in international journals on a range of topics, including the sequentiality of children’s understanding of ordinality and cardinality, and the relationship between Piagetian tasks, traditional intelligence, and achievement tests.

The final highlight was my receiving an invitation from the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VUA) to become a professor of developmental psychology. I gladly accepted the challenge and left Groningen in 1981.

Professor at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

At the VUA I continued my neo-Piagetian research. Furthermore, I found a new extension of the neo-Piagetian orientation within VUA: Paul Harris’s research on the development of understanding emotions. Paul was my predecessor at the VUA; he had returned to Oxford, and this created the vacancy I was invited to fill. His experiments on children’s understanding of emotions had been conducted with his collaborator Meerum Terwogt. I took advantage of his expertise, as my first PhD candidate at the VUA.

The 1980s were, in fact, challenging years for Dutch universities. The government cut budgets because the growing number of students and staff members had made the costs of (public) universities barely manageable.

For research, the government introduced a system of conditional financing. Research groups had to draw up five-year research programs. These were assessed by an external committee and funding followed only if the assessment was positive. During that period in the Netherlands (around 1983), because of numerous negative assessments research lines were discontinued and professional reputations damaged, even destroyed.

Given the system of conditional financing, I designed a research program focused on Social Emotional Development. There I connected the Harris-Meerum Terwogt research line with my own social cognitive work, also including therapy evaluation research that focused on emotional disorders. (Cognitive therapists were attached to our group.) The proposed program was approved, and it was initiated in 1984.

Dutch universities were increasingly judged on the number of publications in international, particularly US, journals. As a corollary, more universities demanded that researchers acquire external grants. I went to great lengths to ensure the survival of my VUA-group and with colleagues around the country I fought for the position of developmental psychology. Among other things, in the endless consultation culture within the Netherlands, this required a lot of meeting time.

At the VUA we were successful: we acquired some five million euros in grants for scientific research. It was my job to ensure that the research was conducted to the highest standards and that supervision of young researchers was guaranteed. I published more than thirty (edited) books and collections while at the VUA and, together with co-authors from my group, some 150 papers in national and international scientific journals.

Because of the increasing internationalization of the discipline, I became a member of the APA, SRCD, and ISSBD.Footnote ¹ In 1987 I was elected a board member of the ISSBD, the only truly international society for developmental psychology, and Secretary General in 1996 (until 2002). That role brought me into direct contact with many of the great researchers of our field: Paul Baltes, Urie Bronfenbrenner, Michael Rutter, Glen Elder, Harold Stevenson, and many (younger) “pillars” to be found in this book. It felt great to belong to this international community and to be recognized as a fellow scholar.

To help put Dutch developmental psychology further on the map,Footnote ² I organized the international ISSBD Conference in 1994 at VUA. It was one of the best attended ISSBD conferences, possibly not so much because of my presidency, but because of Amsterdam’s attractiveness!

Taking History Seriously

Beginning as early as when I was at Teachers College, I had an interest in the history of society’s thinking about children. However, my field offered no place for this interest. That began to concern me increasingly: Are we not attaching too much ahistorical, eternal value to our empirical, scientifically derived data?

I began to realize that my struggle for an empirically analytical developmental psychology might also have had a downside: forgetting, if not dismissing, the cultural and temporal specificity of our research findings. I was given two opportunities to reflect on this issue.

Firstly, my stay in Ann Arbor (1991–1992). I was selected for the Netherlands Visiting Professorship at the University of Michigan. Every year, a visiting professor from the Netherlands holds this chair, 50 percent of which is funded by the King of the Netherlands, and 50 percent by the State of Michigan. Later, I learned that I owed my (royal) appointment to Harold Stevenson, then Professor of Developmental Psychology in Ann Arbor who, as President of ISSBD, knew of me and my work from the Society’s conferences.

That year, I had an office next to Henry Wellman’s; he had just published his great first book on The Child’s Theory of Mind. I studied that book and participated in Henry’s teaching programs. His work was a great addition to that of Paul Harris and an enrichment for my research program at VU Amsterdam.

During that fruitful year in Ann Arbor, I also immersed myself in the History of Childhood. I conducted my first scholarly research in that area: the historical study of paintings depicting children. I had already studied Philip Ariès’s (1960) classic book on the history of childhood where he claimed that a continuous infantilization takes place from the Middle Ages to the present. His concept of infantilization refers to the historically increasing length of childhood, and to a related increasing distance between children and adults. Ariès based this claim of historical infantilization on his analysis of European paintings depicting children.

Judging this analysis too subjective and based on an unrepresentative sample of paintings, I decided to test Ariès’s hypothesis of infantilization empirically. The ethologist Konrad Lorenz demonstrated with his “Kindchenschema” (child scheme) which anatomical proportions trigger innate releasing mechanisms for affection and nurturing in humans. I used these proportions to devise an instrument for assessing historical change in the depiction of “childishness.” This instrument was then applied to representative samples of Dutch and Flemish paintings (from the fifteenth to the twentieth century). Unexpectedly, a correlation of over +.60 was found between the age of the paintings and childishness scores: more recent paintings depict children as more childish. This implies that Ariès’s theory holds – between the Middle Ages and modernity paintings become more childish and this implies a greater distance between childhood and adulthood.

More generally, this finding significantly altered my view of developmental psychology, since it demonstrates, or at least strongly implies, that the relationship between children and adults varies significantly over historical and social time. The paper I wrote on this project (Koops, 1996) ends with the phrase: “I conclude with expressing my hope that developmental psychologists will have the courage to open up the borders of their discipline and to welcome cultural-historical relevance.”

From Ann Arbor, I visited William (Bill) Kessen at Yale University, who encouraged me to explore further the connection between developmental psychology and cultural history. I (re-)read his classic paper (1979) on The American child and other cultural inventions. There, built on his detailed description of cultural historical changes that have shaped the fundamental assumptions of developmental psychology, Kessen’s central message is that such culturally shaped foundations of developmental psychology are never recognized, let alone self-critically analyzed. If the findings of scientific research regarding human development are somehow regarded as fundamental laws of nature, such a view overlooks alternative conceptions of the child and of development in different cultural-historical contexts. Kessen thus stressed that progress in developmental psychology is only possible when scientists analyze the cultural-historical embeddedness of the field. Those who deny this were characterized by Kessen as “positivistic dreamers.”Footnote ³

My second academic year of freedom to reflect in peace was in 1997–1998. I was invited by the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences (NIAS) to submit a proposal for a theme group. I opted for a Historical Developmental Psychology theme group and managed to interest my American colleague Michael Zuckerman (Professor of American History, University of Pennsylvania) and to form a group with him that included Gerrit Breeuwsma (developmental psychologist at the University of Groningen), Els Kloek (social historian at Utrecht University), Hideo Kojima (developmental psychologist and pedagogue at Nagoya University), and Micha de Winter (pedagogue and educator at Utrecht University). All managed to free themselves for a full academic year to work with Mike and me at NIAS. The main product of the group was the book Beyond the Century of the Child (Koops & Zuckerman, Reference Koops and Zuckerman2003), a title based on Ellen Key’s 1900 bestseller The Century of the Child. The book confronts the universality claims of developmental psychology with in-depth historical analysis. And our central claim is that, in the twenty-first century, the infantilization process is now at an end and the distance between children and adults is decreasing.

After these two exercises in the history of childhood and my new understanding of the need for developmental psychology to expand its disciplinary boundaries and welcome cultural-historical study and understanding, I started my last job.

Moving to Utrecht University (UU)

Utrecht University’s group of developmental psychologists had been assessed very negatively by an external international review committee in 1998. The dean of the faculty sought my advice. I recommended finding a senior researcher with the authority to reorganize the program, and then attract young talent. Following my advice, the dean invited me to be that senior researcher. That had not been my intention! I conditionally accepted but made such far-reaching demands that I thought that would be the end of it. However, the UU went along with all my demands, and I could not refuse. So I moved to Utrecht University in 2000.

There I managed to build a research program together with my former PhD candidate Bram Orobio de Castro (now Professor of Developmental Psychology in Amsterdam). Bram had written an award-winning dissertation on the development of aggression. In the new program, I ensured there was an important place for aggression research. To strengthen this program, I attracted part-time professors from abroad: Richard Tremblay from Canada and John Lochman from the US. It went so well that, after three years, the dean asked me to succeed him, and to recruit a young researcher for the research group. With Marcel van Aken willing to continue leading the group, I became dean of the large Utrecht Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences.

Excused from teaching and provided with a full-time personal assistant and a competent team of support staff, I kept two days a week available for academic research.

More importantly, I applied my view of psychology originally acquired from Kouwer to the entire Faculty of Social and Behavioral Sciences: my faculty should be a gamma-faculty. I tried in many ways to nurture the alpha-beta creative tension and promoted collaboration between a range of different disciplines (sociology, psychology, cultural anthropology, pedagogy). Given my intellectual roots, I have derived great satisfaction from that.

Over the years my own academic research in Utrecht mainly consisted of involvement in PhD projects; I frequently co-authored articles with PhD candidates. I doubled the number of publications from the VU Amsterdam period to 300 publications. Almost all my forty-nine PhD candidates became scientific staff members at a Dutch or international university. Seven of them became professors at a Dutch university.

My own, individual research mainly concerned Historical Developmental Psychology. Sufficient here to refer to the publication which was the result of meetings of the History Committee of the Society for Research in Child Development (SRCD), which I chaired from 2014 until 2017 (Koops & Kessel, Reference Koops and Kessel2019).

I ended my deanship in 2012 and retired in 2016. So far, I am fortunate to have been given an office with all kinds of facilities within my university. Until now, therefore, I have avoided age discrimination.

By Way of Conclusion

Developmental psychology is in positive shape internationally. High quality empirical research continues in a wide range of areas. Yet something gnaws at me. When Mike Zuckerman, my American historical-scholar friend, retired in 2009 he offered this reflection: “I am so disappointed in historians today: They are just practitioners of a craft, not intellectuals anymore.” I immediately thought: This also goes for our psychologists. Developmental psychologists are well-trained in conducting research and successfully publishing in international journals. However, they have not been educated as scholars, who are able to frame their field in a cultural-historical context.

In my view, the training of developmental psychologists should also include knowledge of the history of childhood and an interest in the deep embedding of developmental psychology within cultural-historical contexts. Kessen’s appeal can only succeed if the training of developmental psychologists fosters this broader interest. Mindful of, and grateful for, my lifelong model, B. J. Kouwer, I suggest that the recognition of developmental psychology as essentially a discipline between alpha and beta must become and remain central. And while multidisciplinarity is now often called for, that almost always refers to collaborations with the sciences, rarely with the humanities. However, we need those humanities to shape the gamma character of our field.

Self-critical historical research prevents “positivistic dreaming.” Twenty-first-century developmental psychology requires critical thinking about the discipline’s foundations and history, along with deep analyses of how childhood and child development are historically and culturally embedded. What is needed is a Historical Developmental Psychology.