Pioneers in Pediatric Psychology: Assisting the Developmental Progress of Pediatric Psychology

As I reflect on my involvement in pediatric psychology, I realize how lucky I was to enter the field at a particular time. So much was undeveloped, but there was great enthusiasm for what this field of science and practice could become and commitment to create resources and enhanced opportunities for pediatric psychologists. As a graduate student and intern up to the late 1970s, there were no textbooks and few articles that described pediatric psychology activities and research. The fledgling organization of the Society of Pediatric Psychology (SPP) needed everybody’s multifaceted contributions, and the field could flourish only when people participated to their fullest. There was a purposeful strength; we were small, but growing a good idea at the right time and we were lucky to be there. Over 40 years of involvement, I have seen tremendous development and solidification in the field for its concepts, research, clinical applications, informational resources, and its organizational home. In this piece, I offer some history of pediatric psychology as I experienced the developments, focusing more on my involvement in the Society than emphasizing my own research and work with students in the field. In doing so, the developmental progress of the Society and the field may be discerned. In my formative professional years, I had a supportive and innovative research mentor, Mark H. Thelen, as an undergraduate at the University of Missouri, Columbia. I then went to the clinical psychology program at Purdue University that provided some focus on clinical child psychology. Within the first month at Purdue in 1973, Logan Wright, one of the founders of SPP and early researcher clinician, presented a colloquium on pediatric psychology. He made encopresis and “tracheotomy addiction” sound exciting, and I was hooked on the field (which was “officially” only about 4 years old at the time). Donald R. Ottinger was the Purdue clinical training director and had pediatric psychology-related experiences at Indiana University Medical Center. Ottinger had developed a pediatric psychology practicum with Robert Hannemann, MD, a local pediatrician, through which many pediatric psychologists gained their initial clinical experiences in two hospitals and his pediatric clinic. I published an article describing the cases in this practicum (Ottinger & Roberts, 1980). Hannemann later was elected President of the American Academy of Pediatrics and spoke during a SPP program at the 1997 American Psychological Association (APA) Convention about the importance of the relationship between psychology and pediatrics. Also at Purdue at this time, Annette M. La Greca was one of my fellow students and we remained friends and supportive colleagues throughout our careers. After Purdue, I went to the University of Oklahoma Health Sciences Center (OUHSC) for clinical internship at Oklahoma Children’s Hospital. At OUHSC, I received exceptional mentoring in pediatric psychology (before the mentoring term became de rigueur in education and training) from C. Eugene (Gene) Walker, Diane Willis, Arlene Schaefer, and Wright. Wright utilized behavioral components in many of his applications (e.g., reported in several publications), but as a Rogerian-trained clinician, he seemed to think behavioral interventions were mainly a bag of tricks. Walker, on the other hand, was a strong behaviorist who integrated what had been rather traditional psychotherapy approaches with a well-defined behavioral orientation that was then still developing applications in clinical practice. Wright and Schaefer were finishing up the Encyclopedia of Pediatric Psychology (1979) with Gerald Solomon, which was a tour de force for the relatively nascent field, and Walker wrote the chapter on behavioral treatments. Most importantly for my career, I had daily interactions with Walker, whose personal and professional qualities influenced me greatly. I later published with both Wright and Walker (e.g., Roberts, Maddux, & Wright, 1984; Roberts & Walker, 1989; Roberts & Wright, 1982; Walker & Roberts, 2001). Willis had been the founding editor of the Journal of Pediatric Psychology (JPP) and went out of her way to support me and to appoint me to my first journal editorial board when she was editor of the more established Journal of Clinical Child Psychology. At the time, I may not have realized how “young” they were, or how new the field was, but I recognized how much these mentors contributed to my development because they clearly saw their roles to serve as “door openers” to the field—they cared about me and other interns and were integrally connected to the field.