In this chapter I describe how my interests in and commitment to developmental psychology grew in a multidimensional, discontinuous, nonlinear fashion. Prominent early personal, social, and intellectual influences included: coming of age in the 1960s, transitioning from fervent Catholicism to philosophy and science as my guiding stars through college and graduate school. I shape my story around the notion that “half of life is accident, and the other half is what one intentionally makes out of accident.” I began my work by focusing on the nature, causes, and consequences of child maltreatment. Pursuing further research, practice, and policy interests, I conducted theory-informed longitudinal studies of the influence of risk factors (especially poverty and violence) on various dimensions of developmental processes and outcomes. More recently, I shifted focus to the design, conduct, and analysis of randomized trials of school and/or neighborhood-based, social-emotional learning interventions, in the USA and then in conflict-and-crisis affected countries in the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. Creating and supporting collaborations with students, colleagues, and organizations has been critical throughout.
Early Roots: Personal, Social, Intellectual
My interest in developmental psychology started before I knew what it was; and it grew in a multidimensional, discontinuous, nonlinear fashion over time. I now recognize that questions I puzzled over in elementary and high school were, in large measure, developmental questions. Personally, my father’s alcoholism, arrest, and confinement led me to wonder how and why he became the person he was. His recovery via a residential treatment program and Alcoholics Anonymous led me to wonder about the details of how he turned things around, achieved sobriety, and repaired many ruptured relationships. These experiences are the familial roots of what became my personal and professional interests in the development and treatment of mental and behavioral health problems and in the processes of adaptation and maladaptation over time.
In high school, social and political crises of the day increasingly occupied me. In the spring of my senior year, several events convulsed the nation, especially its youth who were coming of age: the My Lai massacre on March 16, 1968, and the assassinations of Martin Luther King on April 4, 1968, and Robert F. Kennedy on June 6, 1968. These convulsions propelled me to become a sometimes volunteer in my hometown of Pittsburgh, PA, and (later in college) to stand against racial discrimination and the Vietnam War. These experiences are the roots of my interest in how the micro and macro environments of young persons’ lives affect their life courses.
In my senior year, I needed to decide where I would apply to college. Would I apply to LaSalle College (a Catholic University run by the order of Christian Brothers who taught at my high school) and to the University of Pittsburgh (the local public university) as my parents and peers seemed to expect? And/or would I apply to several more demanding universities (Harvard, Pennsylvania, Chicago) as my teachers seemed to hope? Which of my emerging values, family/community, or exploration/excellence, would most strongly guide my decision?
I decided to favor exploration and excellence. So I found myself writing an essay for the Harvard application that asked me to describe the one book I read in the last year that made the biggest impression on me and why. Two books that I read in my religion class (which my teacher Brother Guy described as a course in “philosophical anthropology”) leapt to my mind and seemed equally compelling to me. I wrote about both Man’s Search for Meaning by Victor Frankl and Childhood and Society by Erik Erikson. Brother Guy never formally defined “philosophical anthropology” for us. But looking back now, the collection of readings he assigned was consistent with the modern definition of philosophical anthropology as “the attempt to unify disparate ways of understanding the behavior of humans as both creatures of their own social environments and creators of their own values.” Frankl and Erikson became the earliest guideposts in my personal and intellectual journey, a complex journey that I am still on.
In the fall of my sophomore year of college, my father died suddenly of a heart attack at the age of forty-six. My father’s death changed the nature of my relationships with my mother (e.g., helping her learn to drive a car and apply for Social Security survivors’ benefits but refusing her entreaties to return to Pittsburgh), my five younger siblings (ages four to eighteen), and my maternal grandfather (who focused his rage at my father on me instead). In the spring of both my freshman and sophomore years, the university closed at midterm due to campus unrest. In this environment, classes and grades took distant back seats to friendships, family support, anti-war and civil rights protests.
These closures suited me fine. I felt that fate had given me the chance to turn lemons into lemonade! I attended classes sporadically and completed assigned readings irregularly at best (the lemons). While I did not engage in traditional academic class work (with one or two notable exceptions), I did read read read voraciously, independently, following my head and heart, not a college syllabus (the lemonade!). Without knowing it consciously, I began to re-engage via this independent reading in the issues of “philosophical anthropology” that captivated me as a high school senior: how to unify our understanding of humans as both subjects and objects! I spent much of my last four semesters of college either (a) in Mandrake bookstore reading various authors (e.g., Dilthey, Husserl, Ricouer, Habermas) who were contributing to various schools of European philosophy (e.g., phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, critical social-political philosophy), or (b) working part-time jobs (from short-order cook to math tutor) to send some money home for my mom and siblings.
I also began exploring (quite unintentionally at first) the implications of philosophical anthropology for contemporary psychology and related disciplines. I decided that the dominant strands of contemporary psychology were either dangerously reductionist (Skinner) or irresponsibly speculative (Freud), so chose not to major in psychology per se. But Harvard had a department and major called “Social Relations,” an intentional combination of the interdisciplinary leanings of professors in psychology, sociology, and anthropology. Through social relations, I was fortunate enough to take a personality development course with Matina Horner (then an assistant professor and soon to become the President of Radcliffe). Subsequently, I served as an undergraduate research assistant in her lab (coding Thematic Apperception Test [TAT] responses for “fear of success” among young women and men) and as a teaching assistant in the course I had taken the year before.
Thus, while I independently read philosophy and worked at learning personality psychology, I found myself beginning to think about the value of “a humanistic psychology of the developing person” that did not take purely “objective” or “subjective” measures of phenomena as the sole data sources for personality psychology, but also took an articulated life history (or fragments of a history) as a primary data source for personality and clinical psychology. If even fragments of articulated life histories were the right focus, then our responsibilities as research scholars were (1) to develop and apply rules for the valid interpretation of life histories, and (2) to put these interpretations to some practical use in an individual (clinical) and/or collective (societal) manner. In my last semester of college (spring 1973), I decided to write a senior thesis to help me put my emerging ideas to some kind of “test.” My senior thesis endeavored to use this rigorous humanistic approach by writing a nonfiction narrative of my work with back ward patients at a state hospital one summer (actually the hospital where my father achieved his sobriety) and to validly interpret (and hence better understand) that narrative (a fragment of my life history) in the context of European philosophies and personality psychology. Two professors (George Goethals in social relations and William Rogers in the divinity school) served as my advisors and readers. It was a crazily ambitious project for a senior thesis and fell far short of my aspirations. But it taught me a lot.
Beginning to Build a Professional Life as a Developmental Psychologist
In an entry I wrote for my fortieth college reunion, I shared my belief that “half of life is accident; and the other half of life is what one intentionally makes out of accident.” Complex patterns of accident and intention shaped both my doctoral studies and my subsequent career.
It was not until after I completed my senior thesis that I ever entertained the notion of studying for a PhD. Perhaps I was capable of sustained, autonomous intellectual effort? Perhaps in psychology (which seemed more practical) rather than in philosophy? Thus, I applied for and entered doctoral study in clinical-community psychology at Yale University (in large part because it had the fewest course requirements and it was close to Cambridge where my future spouse, Chris Pendry, was still finishing her bachelor’s degree. Indeed, Chris was and remains the most important source of support and advice throughout my “career.”) At that time, I was primarily interested in learning how to foster therapeutic change (e.g., via clinical and personality psychology and clinical work). But my enduring interests in learning how to understand and promote social change (e.g., via applied developmental psychology, community psychology and social policy) soon would be rekindled by Ed Zigler and Seymour Sarason.
The offer of a summer job between my first and second years of doctoral study was the accident that began to reveal a potential path through graduate school navigating between these clinical and policy interests. Because my soon-to-be-wife Chris was going to remain in Cambridge for the summer between her junior and senior years at Harvard/Radcliffe, I looked for jobs in the Boston area. As luck would have it, a clinical and research team on child abuse and neglect run by a developmental pediatrician, Eli Newberger, at Children’s Hospital Medical Center had an opening for a graduate research assistant for the summer. I applied, landed the position, and was assigned by Eli the task of reviewing the meager literature on why some maltreated children were permanently removed from their homes by the state’s child protection unit and some were not. Based on hypotheses from the literature review, I coded both hospital and court records and identified sociodemographic (e.g., family structure, parent SES, child age and race/ethnicity), clinical (e.g., type of maltreatment, severity of maltreatment, parent mental health status) and process (e.g., quality of relationships with hospital staff, legal representation of the parent, appeals filed by parent) factors that could be predictors of the courts’ decisions about removing the child from the custody of the parents. In these highly imperfect but rich institutional data sets, I found little or no evidence for either of the standing hypotheses in the literature at the time: that either racial bias of the child protection system or nature and severity of maltreatment experienced by the child predicted the courts’ placement decisions. To my surprise, the strongest predictor was evidence in the record that parents who vigorously advocated for keeping custody of their child were more likely to do so.
This summer research experience was a turning point in my graduate study and launched a decade-long and deep engagement in various types of work on (a) the nature, etiology, prevention, and treatment of child maltreatment and (b) the workings of the child welfare system. It also shaped my core professional identity away from clinical and personality psychology and toward the newly emerging subfields of “child development and social policy” and “developmental psychopathology.” Under the powerful influence of my doctoral advisor Ed Zigler, who had just started the Bush Center in Child Development and Social Policy, I wrote up my first “policy relevant” study on predictors of the placement of maltreated children as a book chapter (“Solomon’s Dilemma Revisited’‘). With Ed’s approval, I also applied for and landed a job in the Massachusetts state government to work on child welfare reform.
Through a graduate school friend, I soon met Dante Cicchetti, a new assistant professor in psychology and social relations at Harvard. Because of my work in state government on child welfare reform, I was in a position to help Dante launch a longitudinal study of the development of maltreated children. I became so inspired by Dante’s vision for what would become the Harvard Child Maltreatment Project (HCMP) that I devoted most of the next three years assisting Dante in writing proposals for and designing comparative developmental studies of children who were poor and maltreated to other children who were poor but not maltreated. These studies were undertaken in part to test Elizabeth Elmer’s claim that it was the poverty and family disorganization that maltreated children experienced that had an impact on their development, not abuse or neglect per se. Dante focused on studies of infant/toddler/preschool aged children (zero to four years old). And I focused on early school-aged children (five to eight years old). Together, we recruited parents and children from local welfare and child protection offices in Massachusetts as research participants.
Dante and Ed introduced me to many important theoretical perspectives that made lasting impressions on my thinking. Two of the most influential at that time were Mary Ainsworth’s attachment theory (see Patterns of Attachment) and Urie Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological systems theory (see The Ecology of Human Development: Experiments by Nature and Design). The impact of attachment theory on my thinking was immediate. Attachment theory helped to identify meaningful differences in patterns of infant and toddler separation and reunion behaviors and to investigate their adaptive significance. Dante was among a small handful of investigators who were investigating attachment processes in maltreated children and their parents. Under Dante’s direction, the HCMP was among the first to identify a higher proportion of “disorganized” attachments (rather than secure and insecure but nonetheless “organized” attachments) among poor maltreated children than among poor non-maltreated children. And I began to adapt ideas derived from attachment theory to examine similar issues but with different measures among school-aged children. For example, in my dissertation, I found that, compared to poor but non-maltreated children, poor and maltreated school-aged children were overly responsive to adult reinforcement of boring repetitive tasks, and they demonstrated low levels of effectance motivation. In turn, these effects on development compromised their ability to succeed in school. I interpreted this pattern of results as reflecting school-aged, maltreated children’s unique challenges in balancing attachment behaviors and exploratory behaviors (Aber & Allen, Reference Aber and Allen1987).
The impact of Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological systems model of child development took longer to influence my work but had the most profound and provocative influence on my thinking over the years. Urie had worked with Ed Zigler in the late sixties to design (in a theory-informed way), mount (in a pragmatic collaborative way) and evaluate (in a methodologically rigorous way) the Head Start program as part of President Johnson’s War on Poverty. Then both returned to their universities, Urie to Cornell and Ed to Yale. In my second year of doctoral study (1975–1976), Ed invited Urie to give a major colloquium at Yale. Urie was in the middle of writing The Ecology of Human Development and his presentation hit me like a ton of bricks. In this framework, human development is driven most powerfully by “proximal processes” (like parent-child attachment relationships and peer relationships) but also is influenced by more distal processes in the meso-, exo- and macro-systems (like neighborhood poverty/violence, the quality of human services, and the coherence of social policies). No longer was psychology dangerously reductionist, purely speculative or unengaged in social-political change. No longer were intrapersonal and interpersonal processes the sole domain of psychology. Rather, developmental psychology in the modes of Zigler, Cicchetti, Ainsworth and Bronfenbrenner embraced the complexity of both proximal and distal processes and their interactions; and sought to find order in complexity through empirical research and thereby influence program and policy interventions.
The Last Forty Years
After completing my dissertation, I was again unsure about which of several paths I should pursue: clinical, policy, or academic. Because my wife Chris was offered and accepted a clerkship with a federal judge in New York, I applied for all three types of jobs but only in New York. To my surprise, I was offered a tenure track assistant professorship at Barnard College and Columbia University, largely I suspect on the basis of my developmental research with Dante. I eagerly accepted the offer and finally was able to accept that an academic position was my preferred path all along. Thus began my formal academic career as a developmental psychologist. Looking back over the last forty years, I can discern four distinct phases which I will describe in very abbreviated form before I conclude.
Barnard College, Columbia University: 1981–1994
Part of what attracted me so much to the Barnard job was the chance to serve as the faculty director and clinical supervisor of an early childhood program, the Barnard Toddler Development Center. Drawing intensively on attachment and organizational theories of early development, I taught courses and supervised staff and student trainees in early child development, met intensively with and studied parents of young children, and through these “clinical” engagements, began to develop with Arietta Slade (at City College of New York) a new, small and fascinating line of research at the Center and elsewhere on parents’ internal working models (IWMs) of their relationships with their children. Together, we wished to investigate how these IWMs were structured and functioned and whether they mediated the process by which parents’ working models of their relationships with their own parents influence their caregiving behavior with their own children. We found evidence for such mediation (Aber, Belsky, Slade, & Crnic, Reference Aber, Belsky, Slade and Crnic1999).
I also continued to collaborate with Dante Cicchetti publishing papers on deviations in social cognition in maltreated school-aged children (with longitudinal data from the HCMP). Especially meaningful to me during these years was the chance at Barnard to mentor brilliant young women, some of whom caught the bug and have become outstanding developmentalists themselves (e.g., Stephanie Jones now at Harvard, Pamela Morris now at New York University [NYU]) and Lisa Berlin now at University of Maryland). Later in the decade, perhaps motivated by living on the edge of Harlem, I began several studies of the development of urban adolescents, focusing on how they adapted to the many risks they faced. This work was actively encouraged by the William T. Grant Foundation and involved partnerships with community-based youth service programs. They were driven forward via research collaborations with graduate students (Joe Allen and Bonnie Leadbeater) and then with age-mates (Ed Seidman and LaRue Allen). It also led to multidisciplinary work supported by the Social Science Research Council on neighborhood poverty and whether and how it confers disadvantage to children and youth over and above the effects of family poverty. It does, but it took many researchers over a decade to convincingly prove that.
National Center for Children in Poverty, School of Public Health, Columbia University: 1994–2004
The one thing that the Barnard job could not support was my desire for deeper engagement in the social policy world. Consequently, when I was recruited to become the second director of the National Center for Children in Poverty (NCCP) at the Columbia School of Public Health, I leapt at the chance, even though I felt woefully underprepared for the work. NCCP was an applied child policy research center that focused on improving outcomes for poor young children by improving social programs and policies. NCCP focused on childcare, early education, family support (including income support), and child health. It was a national center focused not on federal policy per se, but rather on the policies of all fifty states in the union. So instead of descriptive comparative developmental studies of maltreated children and high-risk youth, I began to conduct descriptive comparative state policy analyses (for instance, on welfare reform) and to use those analyses to engage in “evidence-based advocacy.” Over time, I added to the policy studies and began to conduct longitudinal studies of how poverty and its correlates influenced children’s development and by what mediating processes (Aber, Jones, & Raver, Reference Aber, Jones, Raver, Aber, Bishop-Josef, Jones, McLearn and Phillips2007). For example, my young colleagues Elizabeth Gershoff and Cybele Raver and I used the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study–Kindergarten Cohort (ECLS-K) to test (and confirm) that the relationships between poverty and poor academic and social-emotional outcomes were statistically mediated by low family economic investments in their children and high family stress.
Then, near the end of my time at NCCP, I launched a new line of work, again supported at first by the William T. Grant Foundation and again in partnership with a local community-based organization. In an era of education policy that emphasized going back to the basics (reading/writing/arithmetic), there was little room for educating “the whole child,” especially their social-emotional development. Subsequently, with former students Stephanie Jones and Joshua Brown, we started a series of rigorous quasi-experimental and experimental evaluations of the impact of school-based social-emotional learning (SEL) programs on children’s academic and social-emotional development. I soon became committed to mastering the logic and methods of clustered randomized trials of complex setting level change strategies like SEL (Aber, Brown, Jones, Berg, & Torrente, Reference Aber, Brown, Jones, Berg and Torrente2011).
Institute for Human Development and Social Change, New York University: 2004–2012
After nearly a decade at NCCP, I decided it was time for me to leave … but how and where? Luckily for me, NYU was eager to create a new center or institute to promote cross-school multidisciplinary research on issues at the nexus of human development and program/policy interventions. I was recruited to design and head that initiative. I hoped that an Institute for Human Development and Social Change could become a setting in which researchers could be supported to work in “Pasteur’s Quadrant,” where research contributed both to advancing basic theory in the science of human development and to understanding and addressing real world problems in human development.
IHDSC was founded to address two major institutional challenges: (1) administrative, to develop real expertise in pre-award and post-award research management, thereby reducing the opportunity costs and transaction costs to researchers of working in Pasteur’s Quadrant, and (2) scholarly, to build cross-disciplinary intellectual communities on particular subjects (initially across three schools and seven departments of the university). During this period, in addition to the institutional capacity building work at NYU, my own research leaned further into causal analysis of the impacts of complex social interventions. These included theory-informed field experiments testing interventions in cash assistance, early childhood programs, and interventions for children’s and adolescents’ social-emotional and health behaviors (Aber, Brown, Jones, Berg, & Torrente, Reference Aber, Brown, Jones, Berg and Torrente2011). Advances in both broad conceptual frameworks and in methods to test elements of those frameworks (both measurement and statistical analyses) enabled dynamic multilevel modeling of persons-processes-outcomes in contexts. Methods finally were catching up to and extending Bronfenbrenner’s vision of how to study and strengthen the ecology of human development and Zigler’s vision that such studies could inform social policy design, implementation, and evaluation.
At some point in my first decade at NYU, I could finally crystalize my disparate interests into the two overarching themes of my research career as a developmental psychologist: (1) to understand the nature and multiple influences of poverty and violence, at different levels of the human ecology, on different domains of children’s and youths’ development; and (2) to design and conduct rigorous, theoretically informed evaluations of programs and policies to reduce children’s exposure to poverty and/or violence or to promote children’s resilience in the face of poverty and violence. While this research “program” had not been clearly visible to me in prospect (Aber, Reference Aber and Nelson1994), it was now visible to me in retrospect. And yet, there was another phase of my journey awaiting me.
Global TIES for Children, New York University: 2012–Present
If one aspires to understand the influence of poverty and violence on child and adolescent development, and based in part on that understanding, to devise and test program and policy strategies to do something about poverty/violence and their separate and combined effects on development, isn’t one obligated morally and intellectually to look beyond one’s home country to those countries where poverty and violence are both very different and very much worse? Do the nature, determinants, and consequences of poverty and violence vary in important ways across countries and cultures? If so, might the effectiveness of program and policy strategies used to combat these individual and systems level risks vary by context and culture as well? My answer to the first question is quite simply, yes; I personally do feel obligated! My answers to the second and third questions are, “Let’s not assume yes or no; rather, let’s use research to help us decide.”
This set of questions has led me in the last decade to move from doing work almost exclusively in the USA to doing similar work almost exclusively in low-income and/or conflict-affected countries in sub-Saharan Africa (South Africa, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Niger, Ghana), the Middle East (Lebanon, Jordan, Syria), and Latin America (El Salvador, Peru, Colombia). To do this type of work, I draw on insights and perspectives from decades of work in both developmental psychopathology and in child development and social policy (Aber, Tubbs-Dolan, Kim, & Brown, Reference Aber, Tubbs Dolan, Kim and Brown2021). The work absolutely requires collaborators and partnerships with researchers and nongovernment organizations (like the International Rescue Committee) deeply embedded in these countries. It also requires unique forms of institutional infrastructure and support from within research universities. For this set of reasons, and in partnership with an exceptional young PhD student at the time, Carly Tubbs Dolan, and later with my colleague, Hiro Yoshikawa, I founded and then co-directed “Global TIES for Children” at NYU. TIES is a research center funded primarily by competitive external research grants and focused on “Transforming Intervention Effectiveness and Scale” (TIES) for children in low-income and conflict-affected countries. We at TIES aspire to contribute to the creation of a global developmental science for program and policy action. And so, the work continues.
Final Thoughts
I hope I have convinced the reader that my paths to and through developmental psychology have indeed been multidimensional, discontinuous, and nonlinear.
Both of the subfields of developmental psychology in which I work – “developmental psychopathology” and “child development and social policy” – have come of age over the course of the last forty years. What were considered marginal concerns to the discipline when I was a doctoral student are now full and vibrant subfields of the discipline. Future progress in both subfields toward “a global developmental science for program and policy actions” will require further evolution toward true interdisciplinarity, balancing discipline driven questions with phenomenon driven questions. I have learned to follow my intellectual and sociopolitical instincts and to reject the binary contrasts between basic and applied research and between radical universalism and radical cultural specificity of development. My greatest joys in this work have been my collaborations with peers and with students, most of whom became my teachers. My greatest sorrows have been with nihilistic colleagues and institutions who did not and still do not believe our science can both seek a deeper set of truths about human development and help improve the conditions of children throughout the world.
