The Development of the Person: The Minnesota Study of Risk and Adaptation from Birth to Adulthood

L. ALAN SROUFE, BYRON EGELAND, ELIZABETH A. CARLSON, AND W. ANDREW COLLINS: The Development of the Person: The Minnesota Study of Risk and Adaptation from Birth to Adulthood. The Guilford Press, New York, NY, 2005. 384 pp., $73.00. ISBN 1-59385-158-8. We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time T.S. Eliot ("Four Quartets: Little Giddling," 1942) I worked, as a very young social worker in the early 1950's, at the James Jackson Putnam Children's Center, a psychoanalytically oriented child guidance clinic for preschool children. All of us-social workers, child psychiatrists, the nurseryschool staff, and even our families themselves-held on to one incontrovertible truth: the emotional disturbances of these children were caused by their parents, especially by their mothers. A few years later I watched my own children grow up, each in his or her characteristic pattern manifest already in their early months of life. Many years later I am now watching my grandchildren grow up, three adopted ones among them, each in his or her characteristic pattern manifest already in their early months of life. But apart from my personal observations, other voices have arisen through the years, emphasizing genes, brain chemistry, and the child's temperament, and questioning the first two years as being of special importance, or even arguing that parents are not as crucial as popularly assumed. The authors address all these objections, at least peripherally, and refute them-with their data. The parents in our Clinic were able to give us extensive developmental information on their young children, but parents, we then assumed, were unreliable observers with selective memories. And if a small child "had always been difficult", we could not ascertain the chicken or the egg. We thus eagerly look to longitudinal studies that have always held out the hope that empirical data would clarify our theoretical beliefs, be they convictions or doubts. There have been a whole series of longitudinal studies in the last century, starting with young persons of different ages, fueled by different theoretical assumptions and of varying degrees of conceptual sophistication. We needed a group of researchers who would cover all the developmental angles (physical, cognitive, emotional) starting before the child's birth, using independent multiple assessments at frequent intervals, and analyzing the data with the state of the art statistics. The authors (L. Alan Sroufe, Byron Egeland, Elizabeth A. Carlson, And W. Andrew Collins) of The Development of the Person: The Minnesota Study of Risk and Adaptation from Birth to Adulthood-a group of scholars who for years have been the leading voices in the field of child and adolescent development-undertook such a study. The researchers' interest was in the possibility of predicting the processes of continuity and change, and how children adapt to the circumstances of their lives. What circumstances lead to successful or problematic outcomes? The study took place across three decades, following 180 first-born children whose mothers qualified for public assistance for prenatal care and delivery in Minneapolis. The study was thus mainly focused on single mothers (61%) who were confronted with the hardships of poverty, although among them were students who were only temporarily poor. Half of these mothers were teen-agers, with the participant ages ranging from 12 to 34 years. A number of these mothers and infants were at medical risk. The book is divided into three parts. Part I, "Understanding Development" outlines the study's methodology and theoretical concepts. Part II, "Development and Adaptation" devotes a chapter to each age period, from "Infancy" to "The Transition to Adulthood", with subtitles that signal the essential developmental task of a particular developmental phase. …