My Coming of Age in Gerontology

A seasoned expert on human development and the family describes the interplay of personal change and the major changes in the field of aging. I became a gerontologist in the early 1960s, a midpoint in both my own life and in the life of American gerontology. At one time, when I tried to explain how I had become a gerontologist, my standard response was that as a developmental psychologist I tended to focus on the age period of greatest personal interest to me, which inevitably changed as time went on. In the beginning, during the 1930s, when I was an unmarried college student dreaming of having my own family and children, I wanted to know all about babies. The study of infancy, however, was in its own infancy at that time (and I don't think gerontology existed at all), so I couldn't do much about infants until a few years later. Instead, I became a specialist on the subject of 2-year-olds, reading all the literature there was at that time and teaching and testing children that age in the University of Chicago Nursery School. The other interests and experiences I had about the same time, working as a school psychologist for the Chicago Public Schools and as a director of psychology at a huge institution for the "feeble minded," could better be considered aberrant moves in my career trajectory; since they did not lead to my later interest in lifespan development. This observation could also be made of my half-completed dissertation on a factor analysis of music ability. The only exception was that after graduate school, while working on my dissertation, I did go back--for a while--to my developmental trajectory by organizing a nursery school. Before I had finished my music-ability dissertation, in the year before the war--World War II--I was invited by a former professor to come to the War Department in Washington to join a group of other academics in developing a battery of tests that would be used in selecting and classifying the horde of Army volunteers and recruits who were expected to, and did, pour into the Armed Services as soon as war was declared. Thus it was not until after the war was over and I had my family, with three children, that I returned to my developmental sequence, a sequence that now followed the growth of my children. I started with infancy again, even though there still wasn't very much going on in that field where I was in the late 1940s. I did learn to administer standardized tests and tested a few infants. When my children were preschoolers, I started a new nursery school, and when the old est started elementary school--they were all bom. within four years--I turned back to school psychology, which now was on target. I both diagnosed and treated a variety of "problems" of children the ages of my own until they reached junior high school and became teenagers. In the early sixties, when my children were between 12 and 16 and my marriage was in trouble, I went back to the University of Chicago to finish my Ph.D. degree in human development. Because I was now less interested in factor analysis and music ability, I chose a new dissertation topic--college-aged youth and their parents (for a very practical reason; Richard Flacks and Bernice Neugarten had asked me to administer their research project on Youth and Social Change and offered me the use of the data). With this step, I moved into adult development and acknowledged that I was now a gerontologist--or rather a lifespan developmental psychologist. My entry into gerontology was encouraged by Bernice Neugarten. It was Neugarten's course on adult development and aging that was most significant in revealing to me the rich field of studies on the later years of life. Incidentally, while many others I know have been motivated to study aging by their experience with the aging of members of their family, my parents at this time were still vigorously involved in their careers and did not typify old age. My grandmothers were too remote from my life to rouse my concern. …