Pioneers in Pediatric Psychology: Personal Reflections on the Evolution of Pediatric Psychology

The Editor has offered me an opportunity to write a personal account of my three-decade fascination with pediatric psychology. Although I have written about many topics during my professional career, this is the first time I remember being asked to write about myself, and I find it a bit daunting. I must admit that, after receiving this generous invitation, my first instinct was to reject the offer because of a reluctance to focus so much energy on myself and my expectation that no one else would want to read it anyhow. I moved beyond that initial instinct, however, after considering that there are very few historical accounts of pediatric psychology and one way to improve the situation is to have people like me write about their careers. So here goes. I first heard about pediatric psychology while I was a graduate student at Brandeis University in the early l970s. At that time, I was still searching for my identity as a psychologist. I knew I wanted to be a psychologist working with children from early on; one of my earlier recollections is from high school when I wrote an essay proclaiming “psycology” as my career goal and my tenth grade English teacher responded that my first step should probably be to learn how to spell it correctly. I am not sure why I made that bold declaration as a tenth grader. I suspect that my mother was an important influence because she was always talking with me about people we knew and why they did what they did. Her keen observations led to numer-