Appraising the Human Developmental Sciences: Essays in Honor of Merrill-Palmer Quarterly

1. Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Merrill-Palmer Quarterly

1 Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Merrill-Palmer Quarterly Gary W. Ladd 16 Merrill-Palmer Quarterly has not always looked the way it does today, nor has it always enjoyed its current reputation as a scholarly scientific journal. In fact, MPQ, which is older than many of its contemporaries , has been through many transformations. Indeed, the journal’s purpose, style, and content have changed quite radically in the past 50 years. Accordingly, my purpose here is to review some of the journal’s history, including the confluence of events, people, and institutional forces that brought about its creation and contributed to its longevity, and to commemorate some of Quarterly’s accomplishments from a historical and contemporary perspective. The Era Preceding the Inception of Merrill-Palmer Quarterly Much of what is known about the period preceding the establishment of Merrill-Palmer Quarterly was reported by Irving Sigel in a Quarterly article in 1988. I have based portions of this chapter on his account. The origins of Merrill-Palmer Quarterly can be traced to the social and cultural forces that brought about the child-study movement of the early years of the 20th century and inspired the establishment of child welfare stations and institutes (see Sears, 1975). As Sigel describes it, the events that led to the creation of Merrill-Palmer Quarterly were closely intertwined with the founding and mission of the Merrill-Palmer School for Motherhood and Home Training. From its inception, the central mission of the Merrill-Palmer School was to improve the lives of families and children. The origins of the school can be traced to one or more wealthy benefactors, as is documented by the following entry from the Reuther Library’s online description of the Merrill-Palmer Corporation’s papers: “Established by the Wayne County Circuit Court on June 26, 1918, the Merrill- Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Merrill-Palmer Quarterly 17 Palmer Corporation was formally approved and recorded by the county clerk’s office on July 18, 1918. The Corporation was formed by the court to carry out the will of Lizzie (Pitts) Merrill Palmer who left three million dollars to establish a school for motherhood training .” Sigel (1988) mentions that initial financial backers of the school were enamored of the notion that parent education, particularly the promotion of effective mothering and child rearing, could substantially improve the lives of children and families. Although it was initially envisioned that this objective could be accomplished by “teaching young girls to be ‘good’ mothers” (Sigel, 1988, p. 343), one of the school’s first directors recast this agenda so that the mission became one of educating professionals for careers as parent educators . During this phase of the school’s operation, both undergraduate and graduate students were encouraged to travel to Detroit to receive mentoring in parent education and to study children and families in both home and school settings. For many graduate students these experiences were a prelude to careers in early childhood education, child development, family relations, and family counseling . Moreover, the school’s interdisciplinary staff was composed of professionals whose background and training represented many different scientific traditions, including child development, family studies, early childhood education, social work, clinical psychology, family counseling, and social anthropology. The Establishment of the Merrill-Palmer Institute and Founding of Merrill-Palmer Quarterly In 1951 Dr. Pauline Park Wilson Knapp became the third director of the Merrill-Palmer School. During her tenure she retained the school’s applied and educational focus while moving it toward a developmental and interdisciplinary approach. She also transformed some of the school’s objectives and sponsored new initiatives. The school’s former emphasis on parent education was broadened to incorporate research on human development in family contexts. To emphasize this scholarly activity, Knapp changed the school’s name to the Merrill-Palmer Institute—and encouraged its staff to engage in, along with teaching and training, research on applied child and family issues. Another important initiative was to publicize the products of the institute’s service- and scholarly oriented activities, giving rise to the concept of Merrill-Palmer Quarterly. However, at its inception MPQ’s format and content bore little or no resemblance to its modern-day counterpart. Sigel (1988), for Gary W. Ladd 18 example, likened the first incarnation of MPQ to contemporary magazines such as Psychology Today. This was, in part, the result of the institute ’s then-valued objective of “educating the...