Defense against proliferation in developmental psychology

Abstract

The overwhelming proliferation of developmental psychology resulted in an international amount of over eight hundred journals and a comparable number of scientific Societies and Associations. No scholar can read the resulting number of papers and oversee “the” field. There are statistical and AI-techniques to reduce the enormous amounts of empirical data. But the most important way to of getting a grasp on the meaning and usefulness of our proliferated disciplines is studying the cultural historical reality in which our research takes place. It was William Kessen who learned that developmental psychology itself is “a peculiar invention that moves with the tidal sweeps of the larger culture. Cultural historical analyses by Kessen, Elias, van den Berg, Ariès and Plessner share the insight that the history of childhood consists of the infantilization process: the childhood phase became longer and longer, while at the same time the distance between children and adults was increasing. In te 20th century a de-infantilization took place. Postman wrote about the disappearance of childhood. It is evident that children and adolescents emancipated in the sixties and seventies of the last century. Developmental research at that period offered and impressive amount of infant research (by Robert Fantz and many others), making infants much more human than ever before. And when infants are considered and approached as serious interlocutors, adolescence as a bridge to adulthood is less necessary. The research from the sixties indeed invalidates the very influential classical ideas of Stanley Hall. Twenty-first-century developmental psychology requires critical thinking about the discipline’s foundations and history, along with deep analyses of how childhood and child development are historically ad culturally embedded. Such analyses are a strong defense against proliferation of the discipline.