As Rogoff states in this volume, micro and macro phenomena in human development are mutually constitutive. What does this mean? Unlike the “onion” representation of Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecological model of human development, macro can reside in the micro. That is, the “onion” metaphor suggests that the micro is embedded within the macro, but not vice-versa; macro phenomena cannot be embedded in the micro. But of course this is not true. This is obvious if we consider how – as we now know – societal discrimination, neighborhood poverty, and media influences can become embedded “under the skin” in epigenetic and psychophysiological phenomena (Hertzman & Boyce, 2010).

“Macro” trends such as global climate change inhere in our bodies, whether in the form of microplastic or the sequelae of climatic disasters or incremental temperature change. But also, the micro resides within macro processes. As a dramatic example, in 2021, one or two (perhaps at most five) human beings in the US Congress derailed what would have been the most significant policy advancement in early childhood development of the last half century in the United States (the childcare, preschool and poverty reduction components of the Biden administration’s “Build Back Better” proposal). Thus a macro (political) event (or in this case non-event) bore the imprint of just a few individuals. Similarly, single momentous actions such as Rosa Parks refusing to change her bus seat on an early winter’s afternoon in Montgomery, Alabama, can have macro consequences. So the onion not only functions from outside in, but regenerates from the inside out in a continuous process of interdependent and mutually constitutive change.

Within an Academic Career: Micro Events with Macro Consequences, Macro Events with Micro Consequences

In the space between being a classical pianist in my early twenties and somehow being considered a pillar of developmental psychology, a series of small encouragem,ents have proven to be defining moments in my career. Although many were interactions with formal mentors, quite a few of the most powerful moments or episodes were with informal mentors. Whether an offhand comment occurring in a crowded conference hall, observation of the integration of personal values with professional choices in a friendship, or an offer of support in a formal academic mentoring relationship, influence, modeling, and inspiration often come unforeseen in the multitudinous stream of everyday life. So within life, micro incidents frequently have macro consequences.

One of the areas I study is the converse of this process – how macro events such as policy, societal, or cultural change influence micro processes of development and meaning-making (and vice-versa in that mutually constitutive way). This topic, as the basis for a career in developmental science, would have been unthinkable prior to the 1960s. My career developed more recently than many others described in this book. The immediate forces that shaped the course of my career – such as national policies in the Reagan, Bush I, and Clinton administrations – occurred largely in the 1980s to 2000s. This was a historical period in developmental psychology when research at the intersection of public policy and child development had come of age, drawing from broader trends in the ecology of human development. The founding scholars in the area of public policy and child development included several who were mentors of mentors of mine – Julius Richmond, mentor of Ruby Takanishi; Edward Zigler, mentor of Larry Aber. Ed, in fact, became enough of a guide for my career to have yelled at me at one point in a way that he did often with his own advisees! He and Ruby were two of the scholars in the field who fought for years with the leaders in developmental science to build a space for the study of public policy in the field. As one of their many efforts, they advocated for the flagship journal Child Development to have a small section for applied and policy topics. This was of course relegated to the back of each journal issue as a segregated section. However, the very fact that it existed, and that I was able to publish there, is probably a central reason I was given tenure. I benefited in critical ways from those who opened the doors of developmental science to wider societal and policy issues in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Micro and Macro Representations of Impact

My career in developmental psychology does not fit the heroic mold of individual scholarship. The mentorship I have benefited from has been dyadic or network-based, and my own work continues to be productive as I serve as a mentor to young scholars and in team-based scholarship.

The traditional academic career in psychology and in the social sciences more broadly is that of heroic individual action. That is, the breakthrough scholarly achievement is typically thought of as occurring alone. My publications career in fact started with a single-author publication that came from a serendipitous discovery. In flailing for a final paper in my master’s course on psychopathology, I came across the ten-year follow-up evaluation of the Yale Child Welfare Project. This was a landmark early childhood program in the history of developmental evaluation science, conducted by Sally Provence, Ed Zigler, Victoria Seitz, and colleagues at Yale, that still provides astonishing results, encompassing parent economic mobility, parenting, and child academic and behavioral change. The chance discovery (and xeroxing at ten cents a page in the New York University Bobst Library) of that paper resulted in a master’s thesis in my newly adopted field of psychology. The professor in that class on psychopathology, Christian Miner, in one of those small but consequential moments of encouragement, suggested that I submit it to a journal, and moreover to a top journal. Not having any idea what that meant, I went ahead and did what he said and – after four rounds of revisions, during which process I learned more than in any graduate course about integrative developmental science – launched a career at the intersection of child development and large-scale programs and policies (Yoshikawa, Reference Yoshikawa1994).

Since that instance of single-author academic production, my contributions have occurred in teams, whether ones that I directed or ones that I have participated in. An extremely productive model of teamwork is the intergenerational scholarly network, which incorporates bidirectional learning. Immediately after my PhD I benefited from one of those networks, which Bob Granger of MDRC (Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation) assembled to include newly minted postdoctoral scholars as well as senior economists, anthropologists, and psychologists of human development. Of this group, two non-psychologists became informal mentors – Tom Weisner and Greg Duncan. Through them I learned perspectives on child development from anthropology and economics. Through Tom (who worked on Beatrice and John Whiting’s classic Children of Six Cultures study), I began a twenty-five-year process of learning how to think about culture and mixed methods in human development research. Through Greg and his depth of thought about poverty, as well as his generosity of mentorship (again for a non-advisee), I learned what, for me, were new ways of thinking about quantitative social science, causality, evaluation, and policy.

Social Change and Child Development across Nations, Cultures, and Time

My family emigrated from Japan during a period of massive social and economic change in that country. Emerging from the ashes of its own imperialism, Japan reinvented its economy and engaged in transformative globalization within a few years of World War II. My grandfather, who grew up in rural poverty near Nara, built a globalized multinational corporation grounded in patriarchal power over his sons. In 1956 he sent my father, his youngest son, to the United States to start a branch of his company in New York. Before the passage of the Hart-Celler Act of 1965, which transformed immigration to the United States from a largely European and White stream to one from Latin America, Asia, and the rest of the world, my father arrived in a country that allowed fewer than 500 Japanese people a year to legally enter the US. Many Americans were socialized during the war to think of the Japanese as the enemy; however, he and our family lived through the transition from associating Japan with cheap plastic toys to associating it with stereos and cars that could threaten the US. economy. I grew up in my White friends’ suburban homes in neighborhoods with almost no Asian families, occasionally watching anti-Japan war movies with their families.

The generalized discrimination I experienced towards both Chinese and Japanese people growing up as a nisei (second-generation Japanese-American) in New Jersey eventually led to my studying immigration as well as child development outside the US. I have been drawn to the macro embedded in the micro that immigration always entails, what Marcelo and Carola Suárez-Orozco have referred to as the dual frame of reference, in which immigrants interpret experiences of micro events in their lives against the backdrop of at least two countries (origin and host) and two historical moments (pre- and post-migration). In contexts as varied as urban China’s transformation from a central government economy to a private market economy; immigrant social networks and their influence on the city of New York in the early versus later stages of waves of migration; or the extraordinarily rapid adaptation and agency of the Rohingya in a semi-urban refugee camp environment after being ripped away from their villages in rural Myanmar/Burma – in such varied contexts I have been fascinated by the mutually constitutive experiences of macro societal change and micro human experience and development.

Can the Micro Individual Keep a Candle Lit in the Powerful Winds of Macro Policy Change?

My career has coincided with the movement of early childhood development from the margins of scholarly and public discourse to the mainstream. When I began my career the long-term impacts of the Perry Preschool program on early adult development had just been published (Berrueta-Clement et al., 1984). Most students at child development research conferences were studying adolescence. The notion that early childhood experience could be transformative was not new (cf. Freud, Piaget, Bowlby, and Ainsworth). However, the empirical demonstration of early childhood program effects lasting into adulthood was new and leveraged the power of long-term longitudinal studies. The scientific impact of both very small-scale lifespan longitudinal studies such as the Perry Preschool evaluation and large-scale longitudinal studies such as the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (e.g., Duncan & Hoffman, 1985) was still new in both the US and global contexts.

So, I stepped unknowingly into a newly powerful science of early childhood development that was increasingly influencing national, state, and city policy in the United States. By publishing a master’s thesis that gave equal weight to family and classroom processes as mechanisms for long-term effects of early childhood programs, I aligned myself, again unknowingly, with the Zigler rather than Ramey camp of interpreting the new, exciting results from the Perry Preschool and Abecedarian Project evaluations. That is, Ed Zigler and others in his group considered parenting and family processes as likely mediators of the positive long-term effects of the Perry Preschool, due to that program’s incorporation of frequent home visits in addition to direct preschool intervention. They also considered social-emotional development to be as important as cognitive development in the lifespan, still a very new idea in the 1980s and 1990s (Zigler & Trickett, 1978). Craig Ramey’s group, in contrast, prioritized cognitive development over social-emotional development and did not think that parents played a critical role in creating the Perry Preschool effects. This made sense as they were researchers associated with the Abecedarian project, which did not consider the African American parents in its sample as possessing strengths in socializing their children and so chose not to bolster their roles in supporting their children’s early learning.

The early 2000s, when I was going through my transition from assistant to tenured professor, were a critical period when the interdisciplinary science of the early years had reached maturity and could be synthesized into powerful reports such as Neurons to Neighborhoods (Shonkoff & Phillips, 2000). Working with Jack Shonkoff’s Center on the Developing Child at Harvard and with Jeffrey Sach’s Sustainable Development Solutions Network originating at Columbia, I learned to translate developmental science into powerful everyday prose that could engage, even fascinate, people across the policy spectrum, from state legislators in New Hampshire to ambassadors to the United Nations in presenting the case for including early childhood development in the 2015–2030 global Sustainable Development Goals.

At this intersection of policy and child development, I again repeatedly experienced the power of micro interactions in influencing macro policy. As Janine Wedel (2009) among others has noted, much of policy change occurs in small group conversations that happen to take place with the right combination of individuals at particular moments of promise for change. In my experience a few individuals can make outsize impact, for example, a few ambassadors to the United Nations taking on child development as a message to integrate into the language of the global 2015–2030 Sustainable Development Goals, and then spreading that message. Similarly, but in the opposite direction, and as mentioned previously, a few individuals in the US Congress derailed the Build Back Better policy proposal in 2021, which would have cut child poverty permanently in half, quadrupled childcare funding, and made quality preschool universal across the United States.

Social Change through Participatory Micro Processes

A final way in which micro and macro have coincided in my intellectual development is through the integration of social justice as a frame for most of my work. As an undergraduate, I took an individual-level, social-services approach to participating in social change by volunteering at a homeless shelter. At the same time, I looked up to my roommates and friends who were working on organizing on campus for larger-scale social change through the nuclear disarmament and anti-apartheid movements.

Against that undergraduate background, after college I immediately applied for positions at UNICEF and Amnesty International, with some inchoate desire to be involved in work focused on global child development and human rights. I never heard back from either organization, but clearly in my late adolescence a seed of interest in social change processes had been planted.

My single most rewarding scholarly product – a sole-authored book (Yoshikawa, Reference Yoshikawa2011) – came from bringing the micro perspective to a macro societal problem, in the service of a social justice goal. This occurred in the context of my first years as an assistant professor, during which I sought out collaborations where I could learn developmental science in the doing. After having conducted secondary data analysis during graduate school, I was hungry to learn multi-method developmental science from soup to nuts – conceptualization, measurement, longitudinal data collection, and analysis at the intersection of culture and developmental psychology.

I embarked with my wonderful colleague Catherine Tamis-LeMonda on an intensive, six-year birth cohort study of ethnically diverse and immigrant children born to Mexican, Dominican, Chinese, and African American parents in New York City. There was still far too little known about normative development in the early years in different immigrant, ethnic, and racial groups in the United States. We embedded in this traditional developmental study of annual surveys and direct child assessments a three-year longitudinal ethnographic study, which I conducted initially with the mentorship of Ajay Chaudry, until he left to run child care and Head Start for New York City.

Via that ethnography an unexpected macro theme emerged from the detailed everyday experiences of low-income, diverse parents. That theme – legal status – was central in countless moments as the undocumented parents in our sample related to us about their journeys across oceans or deserts to reach the USA; about their experiences of exploitation in workplaces; and their decisions whether or not to enroll citizen children in programs run by the very government that could deport them. In our field notes, the macro was constituted in everyday micro events with lifespan implications for the development of both caregivers and children. And conversely, immigrants showed extraordinary agency fighting unjust conditions in workplaces, supporting each other across boundaries of ethnicity, and pooling scarce resources to effect positive change in their families and communities.

This theme of agency among immigrants experiencing social exclusion is magnified in my current work, which includes large-scale research with Syrian refugees in the Middle East and Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh. The Rohingya, for example, demonstrate remarkable agency in the largest and most crowded refugee camps in the world. In the context of extreme crowding, uncertain housing, monsoons and heat, not to mention exclusion from all formal employment and education, they have reconstituted kinship and support networks within and across households. They have absorbed the intricacies of a newly multilingual environment, with our evidence showing much intentional deployment of Bangla, Rohingya, English, Urdu and Arabic for different audiences and to achieve different goals (e.g., Bangla and English to communicate with NGO staff; Urdu and Arabic for religious socialization). Informal coalitions have formed in the camps (e.g., of women to pursue informal livelihoods), and many contribute to the betterment of the camps and of children’s learning and well-being in community leadership positions.

Most recently, work led by my doctoral advisee Andrew Nalani has investigated how the macro ideology of Christian nationalism has implications for the micro developmental processes of youth (Nalani & Yoshikawa, 2023). Ideology has been slow to draw the attention of developmental psychologists. It is, however, a powerful factor that has long been considered in the area of public policy. Ideology can and should be studied as a force that varies across settings where youth are active, not as a uniform macro climate affecting development in an undifferentiated way. Consider, for example, how in the USA the belief that church and state should be merged rather than remain separate currently underlies variation in whether youth have access to particular books, whether conversations about sexuality or race can occur in classrooms, and whether youth can go to the bathroom without fear of being attacked. Yet also consider the converse – how youth can develop leadership skills to influence policy change in their own schools, districts, or societies.

Through these repeated experiences of the power of individual and collective agency and voice in macro processes, I am increasingly convinced that we need to change the practice of research, as well as program development, so that respondent agency is incorporated more prominently than how conventional, top-down policy-and-child-development work usually permits. This is equally true of growing initiatives at the intersection of humanitarian aid and child development (Yoshikawa, Reference Yoshikawa2023). If we are to make positive and truly sustainable change among the diversity of refugee, conflict-affected, and displaced populations in the world, we must withdraw from hierarchical imposition of WEIRDFootnote ¹ concepts, practices, and research, and add to conventional “scientific” research methods the more humble and participatory methods of restorative justice or deep qualitative/ethnographic research. In other words, we must listen more empathetically and consistently in our research. And from the program development and implementation perspective, members of the populations we study need to be routinely involved at all levels of decision-making in the conceptualization, development, fundraising and implementation of programs designed for their benefit. Unfortunately this does not always occur, whether in rich countries or, perhaps especially, in low- and middle-income countries where power differentials with dominant global North institutions are magnified.

In Closing: The Power of Open-System Mentorship

Effective mentorship is about scaffolding in ways that may make the advisee uncomfortable. I have benefited from many moments in which I was encouraged to do something outside my comfort zone and for the first time. Write a grant proposal or peer review; submit an article for possible publication; edit or author a book – all of these were suggested by mentors at critical moments, things that I did not feel prepared for, but did with strong supportive nudges “into the deep end.”

But beyond scaffolding, a true mentor advises in areas they may know nothing about, simply because their advisee is interested. In 1994 I dropped a dissertation topic that was within my advisor Ed Seidman’s area of research because I became preoccupied with the drama of welfare reform debates in Washington, nearly of which excluded the perspective of the children affected by such national policies. With his typical generosity and wisdom, Ed wholeheartedly supported and advised in an area that was not his central interest. I have paid that forward by mentoring many students in areas that I knew very little about. Through these experiences – mentoring in areas like disability studies; lactation research; organizational learning; or network analysis – I have entered domains of knowledge that make me a better applied scholar. And I have had lots of fun in the process!

Mentoring is a multi-dimensional process in which you allow yourself to be changed by listening. At the same time, you take responsibility for the fact that you may be changing others by listening to and deepening an advisee’s intellectual path. The process can be multi-final, that is, resulting in a proliferation of intellectual foci across the process of scholarly development, or equifinal, that is, starting from multiple divergent developmental phenomena but finding common states at the end of the mentorship phase (Cicchetti & Rogosch, 1996). In this respect mentoring as a developmental process across time reflects dynamic systems principles (Ford & Lerner, 1992; Thelen & Smith, 1998). In essence, then, the journey of an individual scholar across time and space bears within it the principles of dynamic systems from the molecular to the galactic (Rogoff, this volume). We can be grateful for the scope of such developmental change.

My first doctoral advisee became the child and family division director at a policy evaluation research institute conducting some of the leading policy experiments in the United States. One of my current advisees conducts critical studies of education justice organizing. In between lies the breadth of my career, reflecting the evolution of developmental science in the first two decades of the twenty-first century. I look forward to what the next years may bring to the field in terms of perspectives melding social justice, practice and policy with the study of human development.