The Development of a Person: Children's Experience of Being and Becoming within the Cultural Life Course

Investigations of children’s development as persons are conspicuous by their absence in developmental psychology. Building on central concepts in the work of William Stern and James Mark Baldwin, such as experience, tensions, convergence, persistent imitation and sembling, we propose to draw a basic frame for such an investigation. The empirical investigation concerns five 13-year-old children and their experience of their life-worlds and –time, and their experience of developing as persons. Based on an empirical analysis we extend the perspective of Stern and Baldwin to include a broader conceptualization of the collective level involved in the construction of the persons’ cultural life courses. By doing so, we wish to emphasize that the development of a person only maintains a status of being personal if the conceptualization takes into account the simultaneous and complementary processes which operate to cultivate the life courses – generating a ground from where they can be lived and transformed in personally meaningful ways.