While my research life course is not typical, I have been able to focus on developmental psychology in full. Studying change and continuity, risk and resilience, timing/tempo and transitions, babies to boomers. Topics include self-recognition, social cognition, puberty, pregnancy, sexuality, depression, aggression, and parenting. Poverty, inequality, family structure, neighborhood, and immigration contexts are of interest. Policy-oriented research focuses on federal policies (subsidized childcare, Head Start and Early Head Start, income transfers, housing) as well as prevention programs. My greatest pleasure has been the amazing scholars and students from psychology as well as economics, sociology, demography, endocrinology, pediatrics, biologists, and social workers.

For all of us who have contributed to this volume, and by definition have been conducting psychological research for many decades, it is difficult to pinpoint the most important scientific contribution. After all, we have been toiling our fields for three to four decades, and at the time that we were looking at a particular topic, it seemed to be critical, with scientific passion and thinking devoted to said topic. At the same time, some research has been viewed as seminal and has stood the test of time, which I suppose might be reasonable criteria with which to evaluate one's contribution to our field. Writing such an account seems quite immodest; perhaps others ought to be writing about any one scientist's legacy.

Much of my work has woven together the themes of transitions, timing, and texture, not surprising for a developmental psychologist. My contributions are not in defining these three themes, which presumably are present in all life-course developmental research – or at least ought to be. I am most proud of specific contributions to each of these three T's.

However, I was trained in conducting laboratory research, primarily descriptive of various social and cognitive phenomena (development of self-recognition, attention processing, learning of social cues, and maternal interactions with children, focusing on infants and toddlers). I was firmly situated in the traditional research paradigms of the time. Today, I am perceived as a developmental psychologist who does longitudinal long-term studies that are either nationally representative or at least representative of a large segment of the population (i.e., births in the late 1990s and early 2000s to women in cities with populations of 200,000 or larger) or a city (children in the city of Chicago in the mid-1980s). Today, I am seen not as someone who delves deep into developmental processes, but as a scholar who studies many individuals in more broad terms (since I have done both, I see the value of both approaches).

Two bodies of research seem most important. All involve colleagues from other disciplines. The two transitions are both reproductive in nature (although they involve biology, social, cognitive, and emotional processes): puberty and childbearing.

Early Head Start is a federal, two-generation child development program for low-income children under the age of 3 and their families; as of 2007, it was serving approximately 63,000 children in some 700 communities. After its rapid expansion during the 1990s and a period marked by little expansion from 2001 through 2008, Early Head Start received $1.1 billion under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, which enabled it to serve an additional 55,000 children.

In 1995, the Early Head Start program, in accordance with congressional mandate, began a rigorous, random-assignment evaluation in 17 of the first sites funded. Here, we describe (a) features of the Early Head Start program, (b) methods of the Early Head Start program evaluation, (c) findings when children were 3 and when this cohort of children ended the program, and (d) methods of the follow-up study conducted when children were 5 (findings from the follow-up study have recently been released in another venue).

CHARACTERISTICS OF EARLY HEAD START PROGRAMS

Early Head Start had its beginnings in 1994 when Congress passed legislation reauthorizing Head Start and mandating that up to 3% of the Head Start budget for 1995 be used to establish a new program of comprehensive services for families with infants and toddlers below preschool age. That same year, then-Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala convened a committee of experts in the field of early education and infant development to lay out the principles and operating features for the new program.

The period of pubertal development coincides with a dramatic shift in the prevalence rates of depression. As depressive disorders rise in general during adolescence, puberty seems to introduce a divergence between the genders. Rates of depression in girls and boys are nearly indistinguishable up until this period of life (Nolen-Hoeksema & Girgus, 1994). During the transition from middle childhood to adolescence, girls begin to experience depression at a higher rate than boys. By mid-adolescence, the gender difference in both subclinical levels of depressive symptoms and diagnosable unipolar depression is at the rate of about 2:1 for girls to boys, which persists through adulthood (Nolen-Hoeksema, 2001).

The entry into adolescence is marked by the hormonal and physical changes of puberty; social changes in the family, peer group, and school environment; and concomitant individual changes in cognitive and socioemotional functioning. It is therefore important to consider models that examine the biological, psychological, and social components of adolescence that may contribute to depressive outcomes (Graber & Brooks-Gunn, 1996). The research to date has focused more on biological changes, especially the timing of the biological changes, than on psychological and social changes as a mechanism for depressive outcomes. The purpose of this chapter is to review several different sets of proposed models that may explain the gender differential in depression that emerges during adolescence.

A number of theories have been proffered to explain why this emergence of gender differences occurs coincidentally with pubertal development.

Adolescence has fascinated developmental scholars because the transition into adolescence involves biological, psychological, and social changes (Graber & Brooks-Gunn, 1996). At the same time, adolescence has been a focus for research on psychopathology as rates of several disorders increase dramatically during this time period. Most notably, the past few decades have witnessed volumes of studies and theories on adolescent depression, conduct disorder, and subclinical psychopathology (Steinberg & Morris, 2001). Many of these studies have sought to understand the confluence of bio-psychosocial developmental factors that result in the emergence of serious behavioral and emotional problems. In this chapter, we consider several bio-psychosocial models that have been used to explain changes in internalizing and externalizing behaviors during adolescence. Examples from our own work highlight the role of pubertal development in understanding behavioral plasticity during adolescence.

Discussions of plasticity in developmental processes have frequently focused on early development and gene–environment interactions in understanding development and behavior (Baltes, Lindenberger, & Staudinger, 1998). Despite a focus on the early periods of development, the notion that adaptation occurs in neural and behavioral development throughout life has been a cornerstone of life span developmental perspectives (Baltes et al., 1998; Cairns, 1998). Recent studies in neuroscience have demonstrated that new neural connections continue to be made across the life span (e.g., Bruer & Greenough, 2001) and specific changes in the prefrontal cortex and limbic regions of the brain occur during adolescence (see Spear, 2000 for a review).

Prevention and Intervention strategies for young children are based on the premise that it is possible to alter outcomes such as cognitive, emotional, and social skills as well as school achievement and risky behavior in children and youth. Theoretical perspectives on development are based on a similar expectation. However, model-building and program-building approaches do come from different traditions. And, knowledge from one is often not applied to the other. The disconnect between intervention and theory deprives both of relevant insights as well as the possibility to refine (and perhaps refocus) the ways in which development is conceptualized. How do the findings from the early childhood intervention literature, as reviewed in this chapter, inform theoretical perspectives on young children's development?

In this chapter, several bodies of literature are reviewed — early childhood education programs, home-visiting programs, and the quality of child care programs (which is a distinct literature from the early childhood education literature). The goals (sometimes implicit and sometimes explicit) and the curriculum or program approaches are first considered, based on the existing literature. Whenever possible, programs that are based on random assignment are highlighted. All but the child care quality literature is based on controlled experiments, which allows for causal inference. Problems of selection bias in the child care research are discussed. Techniques are discussed for limiting selection bias in child care research as well as in studies of dose of an intervention (when different groups are not assigned in a random fashion to various intensities of treatment, an approach almost never taken).

Then, short-term and long-term effects of the types of programs are reviewed. The outcomes of interest cover the gamut of child development. In reality, most of the work focuses on achievement quite narrowly defined (e.g., IQ, school achievement, grade retention, high school graduation). Whenever possible, evidence on outcomes in the social and emotional realm are discussed (e.g., behavior problems, delinquency, peer relationships, teenage pregnancy).

Attention is paid to the question of who benefits from particular programs as well as what features of programs might be most relevant. Relationships among children and staff as well as parents and staff are also considered, given the centrality of relationships in developmental research. To a lesser extent, comparisons between the dimensions of effective staff (teachers, child care Providers, home visitors) and competent parents are made.

The past few years have witnessed a renewed interest in early child development. The Carnegie Corporation's Starting Points (1994) and Years of Promise (1996) reports, the creation of a National Goals Panel and the Goals 2000 legislation of 1994, and President Clinton's early childhood initiative (1997) all provide evidence of increasing awareness of the importance of early experiences. Two White House conferences have focused on early childhood development and on child care. Media attention–including an entire issue of Newsweek devoted to the early years, a prime-time television documentary on early development, and numerous television news shows, newspaper articles, and magazine pieces–have conveyed the message that what happens in children's early years is strongly associated with their school readiness, achievement, and adolescent functioning.

During the early years, children make great strides in emotional regulation and the acquisition of gross motor, fine motor, language, cognitive, and social skills. Parents and committed caregivers are the primary providers of experiences associated with those developments. For example, parents provide cognitive and linguistic experiences through activities such as looking at books, encouraging communication, and exposing children to a range of auditory and visual stimuli Bradley (1995; Snow 1993). When parents exhibit warmth through actions such as hugging and cuddling, they influence their children's development of relationships and emotional well-being Barnard and Martell (1995). Finally, through regularity and consistency in daily routines, parents provide continuity and stability, conditions thought to be important to children Boyce et al. (1983).

How do American parents respond to the changes involved in becoming a new parent? In this chapter, we consider three main questions: How do parents divide the responsibilities of daily care for the very young child? What different sources do parents use to obtain information and advice about parenting? and How well do parents feel they are handling their parenting responsibilities? All parents who participated in the Commonwealth Fund Survey of Parents with Young Children had a child under the age of three, so all had recently experienced the transition to being a new parent. The data from the Commonwealth Fund survey offer some of the only nationally representative data on these issues and provide a picture of child rearing in American families today.

THE CHALLENGE OF NEW PARENTHOOD

The transition to parenthood is a life-changing event. New parents are suddenly responsible for the care of a virtually helpless infant, who requires feeding, changing, and soothing 24 hours a day. Caring for a very young child is physically demanding, emotionally intense, and continuous; the transition to being a new parent is therefore both physically and emotionally challenging (Antonucci and Mikus 1998). Lack of sleep alone, part of the lives of all new parents, and often a new experience for them, may affect parents' perceptions of how well they are doing in their new roles and the help or advice they feel they need.