The development of coping

Research on coping during-childhood and adolescence is distinguished by its focus on how children deal with actual stressors in real-life contexts. Despite burgeoning literatures within age groups, studies on developmental differences and changes have proven difficult to integrate. Two recent advances promise progress toward a developmental framework. First, dual-process models that conceptualize coping as regulation under stress establish links to the development of emotional, attentional, and behavioral self-regulation and suggest constitutional underpinnings and social factors that shape coping development. Second, analyses of the functions of higher-order coping families allow identification of corresponding lower-order ways of coping that, despite their differences, are developmentally graded members of the same family. This emerging framework was used to integrate 44 studies reporting; age differences or changes in coping from infancy through adolescence. Together, these advances outline a systems perspective in which, as regulatory subsystems are integrated, general mechanisms of coping accumulate developmentally, suggesting multiple directions for future. research.