Age Differences and Changes in Ways of Coping across Childhood and Adolescence

Abstract

A review of studies examining age differences and age changes in ways of coping across childhood and adolescence reveals two kinds of age-graded patterns. First, there are age increases in children’s general coping capacities, as seen in cognitive and meta-cognitive elaborations of problem-solving (from instrumental action to planful problem-solving), distraction (adding cognitive to behavioral strategies), and support-seeking (from reliance on adults to more self-reliance and reliance on a range of others for different kinds of support). Second, there are improvements with age in the differentiated deployment of specific coping strategies according to which ones are most effective in dealing with particular kinds of stressors. Combining these trends, however, means that children and adolescents may show decreasing use of strategies that they are increasingly capable of deploying, as they become both more self-reliant and more discriminating about which strategies are likely to be effective for dealing with specific kinds of stressors. Taken together, findings suggest age periods during which coping with stress shows both quantitative changes and qualitative shifts. These are the earliest years of life, the years between ages 5 and 7, and the transition to adolescence (about age 10–12). Moreover, some of the most sophisticated coping responses may not fully emerge until late adolescence or early adulthood. Such cumulative findings suggest that future developmental research should focus on these transition points, while measuring all of the coping families or focusing on the organization or flexible deployment of a range of coping strategies.