8 1 Coping as Action Regulation under Stress

identified, chief among them intelligence, sociability, perceived control, and social
support from parents, teachers, and peers.

1.1.2 Multi-level Integrative Systems Frameworks:

Coping, Regulation, and Resilience

As productive as these conceptualizations have been for the study of individual

differences during adulthood, taken by themselves, they have turned out to be a
dead end for the study of the development coping during infancy, childhood, and
adolescence (Compas 1998; Coping Consortium 1998; Skinner and Edge 1998).
The focus during adulthood on individual differences, cognitive appraisals, and lists
of ways people respond to challenges and threats, on the one hand, alternating with
the examination of stable personality characteristics, traits, and coping styles, on the
other hand, do not seem to provide much guidance for developmentalists, who are
interested in studying the kinds of involuntary reactions to stress evinced by
newborns, and understanding how these are transformed across childhood and
adolescence; how children accomplish the enormous qualitative shifts in dealing
with challenges and threats that are so apparent not only over the first year of life,
but also by the time a child starts preschool at age 3, enters puberty at age 12, or
leaves home at age 18.
To make progress on a developmental agenda for the study of coping,
“developmentally-friendly” conceptualizations were needed (Coping Consortium
1998). By “developmentally-friendly,” we mean definitions that tie coping back to
its roots as a fundamental adaptive process and that make clear the reciprocal
relationship between coping and development. Such a conceptualization needs to
provide entry points for determining how development influences coping, that is,
how coping is shaped, not only by individual differences, but also by a child or
adolescent’s past experiences, current developmental organization, and ongoing
normative developmental changes. And in turn, it needs to show how coping
influences development, that is, it needs to explain how the processes through
which children and adolescents adapt to stress, master challenge, and deal with
failure cumulatively shape their development, for better or for worse. Overall, it
needs to create a framework broad enough to recognize “coping” at birth and to
connect it to homologous and emergent processes across the lifespan.
Over the last 15 years, developmentalists have converged on a multi-level
integrative systems framework that integrates the prototypical view of coping as an
episodic process, with work on resilience and on regulation (Coping Consortium
1998; Skinner and Zimmer-Gembeck 2007, 2009). According to this framework,
which draws from closely related lifespan developmental (Baltes et al. 1998),
dynamic systems (Ford and Lerner 1992), contextual-ecological (Bronfenbrenner
and Morris 2006), and action (Brandtstädter 2006) perspectives, development
emerges from the confluence of processes ranging from genetic and physiological
to societal. Dynamic systems views point out that it is the ongoing recursive