In 2012, I was invited to write my career autobiography, and I did so with enthusiasm, reflecting on almost four decades of work in human development and family studies (Verma, 2014). My story, I think, was one of commitment, curiosity, and relationships; of many points of connection and potential dialogue, of shared responsibility for studying and improving the lives of marginalized young people – on the streets or living in socially deprived contexts. It felt like rewinding my early career days and reliving those times, sometimes painful, other times exhilarating.

Now, in 2023, emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic, I am invited again to reflect on my work and contributions as a developmental psychologist. This part of the story involves focusing a lens on my academic career trajectory that is both objective and reflective, the turning points, the dilemmas and disappointments, the cultural nuances and sensitivities, and all that comes with being a developmental scientist working on issues of adversity and resilience, inequity, and social policy.

Initiation into the Field of Human Development

My love for the field of child development emerged while earning my BSc in Home Science from Delhi University. I had a fantastic teacher, Ms. Patel, who portrayed a world of children and their development with so much intrigue, curiosity, and knowledge-seeking that I read much more than required, and decided I wanted to specialize in this field.

Ms. Patel recommended that I go to the highly regarded Child Development Department (which later became the Department of Human Development and Family Studies, HDFS) at Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. I followed her advice and completed my master’s degree in Child Development in 1976.

This is where I met my guru, T. S. Saraswathi, an incredible teacher and cross-cultural psychologist with a distinguished international reputation. She inculcated in me the critical thinking skills and sensitivity required of researchers. Professors Amita Verma, Promila Phatak, and Veena Mistry were all great teachers who personified professional ethics and love for the discipline. The challenging curriculum involved both courses and fieldwork. Discovering Freud, Piaget, Vygotsky, Bandura, Bronfenbrenner, and other theorists opened my eyes; and I have always loved teaching theories of developmental psychology.

My work has been deeply influenced by these theorists. For example, Vygotsky’s sociocultural theory of child development provided an account of the influence of culture on children’s development, where children develop behaviors and habits through interpersonal experiences or cultural mediation in their zone of proximal development. He drew connections between language and thought and studied the key role of play in children’s concept formation, learning cultural norms and socially approved behavior. I found his Thought and Language fascinating and thought-provoking. The debate between Vygotsky and Piaget on what came first, Thought? or Language? was later a favorite topic with my students. And for me as a student, Piaget was probably my favorite theorist. Reading his interviews with children provided great insights into a child’s mind via the prodigal mind of a psychologist.

The growth of psychology in India has played a significant role in my career. Durganand Sinha, a proponent of indigenous psychology, traced how psychology in India was originally modeled on the Western scientific tradition. But after India’s independence, as it underwent massive expansion, there were dissenting voices about its imitative nature. Thus, a movement toward indigenization of psychology teaching and research gained momentum over the decades.Footnote ¹ Psychological themes and socialization practices that link Indian childhood to sociocultural traditions and institutions have been studied by S. Anandalakshmy, Sudhir Kakar, and T.S. Saraswathi. And now psychology in India is seeking a still-newer identity rooted in its rich heritage and cultural diversity. This has led to advances in psychological research in India having a greater focus on socially relevant issues, a movement to which I have sought to contribute.

Connecting to Ground Realities and Developing an Enabling Child Welfare Model

How did my path connect to such issues of scholarly identity? Starting in June 1976, as a district Child Welfare Officer I was responsible for implementing and supervising day care centers, balwadis (preschools), special nutrition programs, and homework classes for disadvantaged children. The condition of these services, primarily located in rural areas, was disheartening. The quality of Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) was poor, and teachers’ preparedness and skills outdated.

A journey in the field of ECCE for the next seven years and six months began here. My overall goal was to create an environment for mutual sharing of trust and ideas. But I needed to be cautious: most of the teachers were my seniors who regarded me as a novice. (I was twenty-two years old.) My best path was to approach them as a co-worker on equal footing, hoping to become a role model. To earn their trust I spent most of my time traveling to the village ECE centers, where I worked with each teacher (called balsevika) to plan (and hopefully implement!) the new programs.

This work went through several phases. For example, in early 1977 I introduced a peer-feedback system and conducted a series of workshops on ECE-related issues, always in close, mutually respectful relationships with teachers. This was a long and arduous process, but I ultimately managed to raise funds, equip the centers and crèches, and train senior teachers to conduct their own workshops and supervise balwadis in adjacent villages.

Then in March 1978 I moved to Chandigarh as principal of the training wing of the Haryana State Council for Child Welfare. For the next five years I trained teachers to work in rural areas under the Integrated Child Development Services Scheme (ICDS). My work focused on the standardization of teaching modules, teaching aids in ECE centers, and parent awareness programs for promoting child health and development. Along the way, the Indian Association for Preschool Education (IAPE), with stalwarts like Amita Verma, Mina Swaminathan, Veena Mistry, Rajalakshmi Muralidharan, and Adarsh Sharma, contributed greatly to the growth of the field of ECCE in India.

My experience with teachers provided further evidence that more traditional modes of in-service training (such as lectures) needed to be replaced by programs that provided help for teachers in their individual classrooms; also, that working as an advisor with teachers in ECE centers over extended periods of time, I needed to be constructive, non-defensive, and resourceful. This seemed like an enabling model feasible for in-service training.

Creating enablement-based work conditions, I believed that each community and its ECCE had its own patterns of strengths and weaknesses, resources and needs, goals and purposes. Conversely, a preconceived and pre-specified curriculum model congenial to one community might be insufficiently sensitive to the qualities and patterns of another.

In this new position I was confronted with many of the same issues I had seen previously: lack of follow-up, poor monitoring of staff, and a gap between teachers’ training and their expectations. But I also encountered a new, more profound challenge: the organization’s top-down bureaucracy. I soon found myself faced with a moral dilemma: working within a system defined by waste and inefficiency, to say nothing of institutional stubbornness, could I nevertheless make any concrete improvements in the lives of children? Since I could not change the system, my only options were to accept the conditions or quit. I chose the latter.

Thriving in Mediocrity

In 1983 I was selected for a teaching position in child development in the Government Home Science College, Panjab University, in Chandigarh. Thus began my transition to academia. When I joined the college as the only faculty member there was one undergraduate child development course. Within a year I started the department’s lab nursery school, Chaitanya, which I designed and furnished. In 1986 I started a MSc in Child Development and increased the number of faculty.

The early years were difficult. Getting new positions approved by the government was arduous, and I was teaching over twenty-six hours each week while supervising the nursery. Still, in 1986 working on social deprivation and problem solving among adolescents, my own education reached its apex when I earned my PhD, working with Vidhu Mohan from the Psychology Department at Panjab University. I will be forever grateful for her mentoring and championing the activities I organized in the college.

Based on my experiences connecting theory, research, and fieldwork, I forged a vision for an interdisciplinary curriculum for the child development department focused on indigenous perspectives, and I sought to introduce ethno-cultural sensitivity among faculty and students. We did this, for example, by teaching a culturally inclusive curriculum, incorporating diverse perspectives and community experiences for students, and using multicultural instructional examples.

In these first years at the college I concentrated on strengthening the department by starting the master’s and doctoral programs, as well as a diploma in child guidance and family counseling and updating the syllabi. Among other priorities, I sought to improve the quality of research with a focus on documentation and dissemination.

But then too there were challenges. For example, funding scarcity for international journals in the field was always an uphill task. Driven by the usual frustrations of non-response from authors to reprint requests and non-availability of journals, I often had to make personal contacts to collect relevant materials or undertake a laborious hands-on search of library collections.

Again, I struggled with introducing innovation in an institution where the academic culture thrived on perpetuating stereotypes and promoting or at least tolerating professional lethargy and mediocrity. Lack of adherence to rigorous standards of productivity and accountability, outdated pedagogy, invasive monitoring, and lack of collegiality among faculty themselves were bothersome. However, I refused to let it bog me down (Verma, 2014).

International Networking

My previous experience with the child welfare council had strengthened my resolve to keep moving forward. Still institutional challenges remained. In 1991 I initiated a research project Street to School – mainstreaming street children by involving several nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) at the city level. Despite my having a sanctioned grant from UNICEF, the Education Department refused to grant me permission to accept the grant. (They believed that academicians should not involve themselves with applied work with children; that was work exclusively for NGOs.) Undeterred, I continued with the research part of the project (along with my students) and in close collaboration with the NGOs already working on these issues.

Perhaps driven by my frustration with the bureaucracies immediately around me, I made great efforts to network with organizations, especially in the international arena. And in what became a thirty-plus-year process, I discovered an interesting insight: far-flung colleagues engaged in the same kind of work often understand each other better than do those within their own country! In any event, here are just three examples of such research-oriented collaborations:

1. (1) With Reed Larson, I initiated a time-use study of Indian adolescents, conducted a national-level seminar on research methodology, and collaborated on various articles (e.g., Verma, Sharma, & Larson, Reference Verma, Sharma and Larson2002; Verma & Larson, Reference Verma and Larson2003).

2. (2) With Kenneth Rubin I collaborated on a cross-cultural study of parenting beliefs and socio-emotional development among toddlers.

3. (3) With Eugene Roehlkepartain I conducted an exploratory study of Indian adolescents’ spiritual development.

In the same networking spirit, being a two-time fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in Behavioral Sciences (CASBS) at Stanford University was invaluable. Outside the center I developed close professional links with William Damon and was a regular at the seminars held at his Center of Adolescence at Stanford. This connection not only gave me the opportunity to present my work on adolescence in India, but also to deepen my understanding of current research issues.

On Stanford – my interactions with Albert Bandura over the years were immensely rewarding. We first met in November 1992 at a Jacobs Foundation conference on “Youth in the Year 2000: Psycho-Social Issues and Intervention,” organized in Germany by Michael Rutter. Even before meeting Bandura, however, I had been using his social cognitive theory as a theoretical basis for my research with youth.

In my second fellowship at CASBS, 2007–2008, Marlis Buchmann and I secured sponsorship for a project on “Comparative Perspectives on Adolescent Development in a Globalizing World: Changing Opportunities, Constraints, and Pathways of Risk.” Our primary objective was to advance comparative cross-national research on adolescent development in developing countries, with a special focus on at-risk youth, and also establish an international network of youth researchers and scholars. Our analytical research centered on mechanisms and impacts of marginalization.

My time spent at CASBS was memorable in many ways. The center proved to be a retreat where the spirit of international solidarity is strong. The psychological foundation for achievement and sharing, the power of motivation, the compulsions of a curious mind – all of these are nurtured in a space that grants freedom of thought, action, and expression. I thus emerged with greater confidence and heightened appreciation for my own work. The sense of belonging to a community of scholars from diverse backgrounds and disciplines helped widen my perspective and prompted me to delve into unconventional issues, connect to diverse cultures, and work across disciplinary barriers. Although this close connectivity and shared vision proved challenging for me in some ways, sharing thought frames, shedding long-standing views and mindsets, confronting self-doubt, and emerging through self-reflection … these were some of the memorable developmental processes that I experienced at CASBS (Verma, 2014).

My narrative remains incomplete without mentioning my mentors along my career trajectory. Given limited space, I can only mention these:

• As signaled earlier, foremost I owe a great deal to my Guru, T. S. Saraswathi, who groomed me as a researcher and collaborator on various projects. Her disciplinary insights and culturally sensitive grounding in thought processes is remarkable.

• Anne Petersen, whom I met at the Michael-Rutter-organized conference, has been a mentor and great source of inspiration over the years. She has provided rich input for many of my academic activities, and we have collaborated on writing projects and activities related to capacity building of young scholars in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). Moreover, she is one scholar from the West attuned to issues and challenges that we scholars from LMICs face.

• Catherine Cooper is another esteemed scholar always ready to share and provide input on my work. Our similar concerns and shared purpose are reflected in our collaborative work, approaching issues from different cultural perspectives (Verma & Cooper, 2017).

Finally in the context of international networking: as a teacher, mentoring students regarding the importance of such networking has always been a high priority. As only one example – Deepali Sharma and I started the first young scholars’ initiative at the 2004 biennial meeting of ISSBD (International Society for the Study of Behavioral Development) in Ghent, Belgium. Since then, our initiative has only grown, with young scholars screening several new and exciting proposals on need-based workshops exclusively for their community.

Prioritizing Socially Relevant Research and Impacting Policy

Advocacy became the defining factor of my work. I also came to understand that, at core, I am an academic activist. I have organized numerous seminars and workshops and conducted research on issues affecting the lives of children and youth. Among the many topics: gender discrimination in India; behavior settings of street and working children; child-friendly cities; life-skills education to address adolescents’ problem behaviors and transitions to adulthood; and adolescents in single-parent families. Many of these projects involved intervention studies, such as a five-year longitudinal study on life skills for psychosocial competence among youth.

As a brief example of such socially relevant engagement and research: in the mid 1980s, academic stress among preschool children was gaining attention. Fortunately, some of my colleagues at the IAPE and National Council for Educational Research and Training (NCERT) – most notably, R. Murlidharan and Venita Kaul – were, like me, studying the effect of stress on early cognitive abilities and classroom adjustment. In 1993 I worked with the NCERT to organize a regional seminar on “The Burdened Preschooler: Issues and Alternatives” to provide a forum for discussing relevant topics. We also launched the Basta Hatao Bachpan Bachao (“Shed School Bags, Save Childhood”) campaign to alleviate academic stress on preschoolers and improve the quality of ECE in Chandigarh.

It is gratifying to note that our campaign spread throughout the country. The seminar report was circulated nationwide among government institutions, schools, and teachers, and was instrumental in highlighting stress among young children in urban ECE centers. The campaign also drew the attention of the Chandigarh Education department, which agreed to citywide implementation of the report’s recommendations. I thus convened a core group of members from the management committees of various schools, teachers, and the government to work on action plans; ran workshops for teachers; helped revise curricula and admissions criteria; and implementation of the recommendations.

Emphasizing that the media covered these issues both widely and effectively, I consider this as one of my most successful initiatives in advocacy. Indeed, a Supreme Court ruling endorsed our efforts by agreeing that three years has to be the minimum age of admission to preschool. The latest National Education Policy (2020) now recognizes the significance of quality ECE for all children in India.

More broadly, my book with Anne Petersen on Developmental Science and Sustainable Development Goals for Children and Youth (2018) addresses developmental issues related to inequities, gender, health, education, social protection, climate change, and needs of vulnerable populations of children and youth, with a focus on LMICs. Also, as a guest editor with Anne and Jennifer Lansford, the 2019 issue of Zeitschrift für Psychologie on Sustainable Human Development addresses challenges and solutions for implementing the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), again with a focus on LMICs.

Then came the COVID-19 pandemic. Indeed, 2020 was a landmark year, conjuring up disturbing scenarios. Quarantined at home, I felt restless trying to figure out how best I could contribute. Precisely then, Christiane Spiel from the University of Vienna invited me to join a multi-country research project, “Learning under Covid-19 Conditions.” I agreed and, sitting in my study for the next three months, I catalogued the experiences of school children. I involved the city Education Department and shared the findings with them. This project collected data from students, teachers, school principals, and parents. The learning situation of students was analyzed across countries, including India (Holzer et al., 2021).

In parallel, I joined the Society for Research on Adolescence (SRA) COVID-19 Response Team in August 2020. This initiative brought together scholars working on the global impact of the pandemic on adolescent development. Our aim was to disseminate evidence on these impacts and coordinate international networking for research and recovery. The team created a shared communication channel and disseminated early findings through webinars, conferences, and publications. This initiative led to the Global Scholar Network of sixteen scholars and fifteen mentors conducting research in nineteen countries, primarily LMICs, and merged with ICDSS (www.fjcolab.org/icdss-covid-19-scholars-network).

Finally, on socially relevant, policy-oriented research: collectively, and despite heartbreaks along the way, we need to evolve strategies and testing measures that make us more effective. We must focus on crucial social issues while highlighting the voices of those whom we are studying and engaging, in reciprocal ways, key stakeholders to reduce the gap between developmental science and social policy.

Experimenting with Methods

During my decades-long research work, I came to realize that quantitative measures and methods were not capturing true lived experiences of children and adolescents. My discussions with street children, for example, revealed how little I knew about their lives, especially of those managing great adversity. It also made me appreciate their stories of resilience, their strengths, and the reciprocal learning that resulted from my interactions with them. There started my journey in participatory research.

Aside from that overall perspective, and again given limited space, I can only mention that most of my projects have deployed a wide range of methods, both qualitative and quantitative; whether with street children in India (Verma, Reference Verma, Raffaelli and Larson1999) or assessing pathways of risk among street youth in India, Indonesia, the Philippines, and South Africa (Sharma & Verma, 2009; Verma, Sta. Maria, & Morojele, 2011). And this related overall observation: when it comes to participatory research, successful fieldwork is more than just collecting reliable and rich data. To understand a community, one must often be immersed in that community.

Internationalization of Developmental Science and Future Directions

Here I offer views on three issues: the internationalization of developmental science with its quality expansion in LMICs; transdisciplinary multi-sector collaborations; and transformative research.

Developmental science, despite substantial progress in recent decades, still presents findings primarily from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) cultural settings. This misrepresentation obviously limits our understanding of human development in diverse contexts. Fortunately, significant changes seem to be emerging: with increasing emphasis on international and cross-cultural developmental research, along with mechanisms and platforms for fostering such collaborative work; a heightened effort for improving representation in research and related practice and policy; and, more generally, ideas for the integration of research from diverse cultures into a broader, deeper theory of human development.

Similarly, there are important examples of developmental questions that have originated in non-Western contexts that could provide insights on child development globally, such as: Do Indian adolescents differ in their family experiences than their counterparts in individualistic Western cultures (Larson, Verma, & Dworkin, 2003)? How then can findings and theoretical constructs originating from such studies be introduced to a global audience of developmental scientists?

Moreover, in the Global South and Global East, there is a burgeoning of critical discourse and literature on child rights, childhood, and indigenous socialization practices. Knowledge about childhood also remains evident in oral tradition, practice, and social movements. Very often, these are dismissed by developmental scientists as either atheoretical or less robust compared to northern, published work. But by engaging with indigenous epistemologies of childhood we can make a case for repositioning the periphery and the core, as well as bridging the empirical and the theoretical in childhood studies.

Such repositioning requires confronting several barriers. Among these: training researchers in conducting collaborative studies in LMICs; funding research resources; and creating effective measurement tools appropriate to local cultures and languages. The high rejection rate common to peer-reviewed journals is another obstacle. Low representation of editors and reviewers from the Majority World in leading developmental science journals raises the question of possible implicit bias on the part of editors and reviewers. However, this issue of international representation in psychology journals is being proactively addressed by several leading journals. I was involved in planning one such effort undertaken by National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine in 2021 for journal editors on International Perspectives in US Psychological Science JournalsFootnote ².

I briefly share some thoughts on energizing transdisciplinary, multi-sectoral collaborations through knowledge creation and translation. Recent theoretical and methodological advances, such as greater availability of “big data,” have promising implications for addressing complex real-world problems and policy issues. For research to be transformative we need long-term global perspectives on social inclusion, inequity, social justice, and sustainability. And given that linear approaches in research and siloed strategies for implementation are no longer adequate for addressing many societal problems, developmental science institutions need to promote the advancement of genuinely transdisciplinary research. Opportunities for engaging in collaborative projects with local families and communities need to be created early in scientific careers enabling resource and expertise sharing and seeking unified voices on evidence-based solutions.

Policymakers are eager for evidence-based strategies that help address societal problems. The United Nations 2030 Agenda of Sustainable Development Goals defines steps aimed at building global momentum for positive change for young people. Developmental science, with its increasingly varied models and methods for comparing sociocultural contexts in non-ethnocentric ways can integrate the SDGs into research in LMICs (Verma, Petersen, & Lansford, Reference Verma, Petersen and Lansford2019). And to capture regional and within-country knowledge and associated sociocultural diversity, we need to facilitate research led by local LMIC researchers who are meaningfully part of research-practice-policy networks (Verma & Petersen, Reference Verma and Petersen2018).

Handing Over the Baton to the Younger Generations

As an active member of professional organizations such as ISSBD, SRA, and SRCD (Society for Research in Child Development), I have acted on these priorities: promoting greater visibility for the Asian region in professional societies; capacity-building and mentoring initiatives for young scholars in Asia, Africa, and Latin America; and facilitating regional collaborations and opportunities for resource sharing.

With those commitments in mind, my message to early career scholars, especially those from LMICs, is to take advantage of COVID-19’s “new normal” and connect online with colleagues across the globe. You can break barriers, disseminate your work widely, and have authentic conversations with colleagues across and within your country that lead to innovative research collaborations. Your worldview and the quality of your research will increase manifold, and you will gain insights impossible when you work in silos.

The field of developmental science is expanding rapidly, with more open-access literature just a click away. Empower yourself with the skills of “big data” analysis, engage with policymakers by mapping evidence-based solutions to social issues in your cultural setting, and work collaboratively with communities and agencies that influence the lives of children and adolescents. Be proactive in identifying support, mentorship, and collaborations. Form advocacy groups to bring societal issues to life and network with the right people to drive change in these areas. Finally, when confronted with ethical challenges, believe in yourself!

Concluding Comments

Reflecting on my forty-seven years of work in the field of human development has been an intense experience. Memories and myriad flashbacks, happy and not-so-happy, have emerged. Amidst it all, I am grateful that the academic activist in me still thrives. Engagement with the International Consortium of Developmental Science Societies (ICDSS) COVID-19 Global Scholar Network and with the Developmental Scientists for Climate Action (DevSCA) sustains my zeal for working on socially relevant themes. Then again, life has not been just work; I equally enjoy classical music, yoga, nurturing my Zen garden, caring for stray cats, spending time with family and friends, and of course, my walks at the Sukhna lake in Chandigarh.

I am extremely grateful to everyone who has joined me on the journey. May it continue for many more years to come.