ICD: A century of advancing developmental science
The Institute of Child Development celebrates its Centennial
In 2025, the Institute of Child Development (ICD) celebrates its Centennial—a century of leading the field of developmental science and advancing discoveries that have improved children’s wellbeing across the world.
At the founding of the Institute in 1925, there were many ideas about what work the small, but dedicated, staff of researchers might undertake in the burgeoning field of child development. There were lofty goals of how science might influence parenting and outline procedures for child rearing. In 1927, John Anderson, the founding director of the Institute, gave a speech at a parenting education conference in which he described an imaginary mother in the distant future successfully consulting scientific parenting manuals to get her child to eat his carrots. He said
“If you picture the care and training of a child in the year 2000 in these terms after all the research that is being started on the child’s development is done and all parents are thoroughly educated ... you will be badly disappointed. There will be problems in the year 2000 and many of them ... But, and this is the important point, the general level of the great majority of children will be healthier, and happier than they are now. While society through science will never quite catch up to the problems proposed in the home and by science itself, nevertheless, there will be a steady advance and an improvement of the general level.”
The founding of the Institute
The founding of the Institute at the University of Minnesota was mainly driven by forces outside of the University, both societal and philanthropic. Megan Gunnar, Regents Professor and director of ICD from 2011-2020, says that in the early part of the 20th century, many people were excited about the idea of doing things scientifically, including raising children.
“At that period of time, we really didn’t know much about kids. We didn’t even know when teeth erupted,” Gunnar says. “And there was a group of philanthropists around the United States that began to suggest that kids should not be in factories, they should be in schools ... If we understood more about children’s development and the things that affected them, we could raise kids that would be healthier, happier, and more productive.”
At the Institute’s 75th anniversary, a publication was commissioned to document the history of the Institute. According to that publication, this is how the Institute came to be at the University of Minnesota:
An economist at the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial (LSRM), Lawrence K. Frank, was administering programs for children and parents and began developing a vision for what would become a child development scientific field. In addition to funding similar research institutes at the University of Iowa and Teachers College at Columbia University, Frank began conversations with his former college classmate, Lotus D. Coffman, president of the University of Minnesota, about creating a research institute here.
In 1925, funds were given by the LSRM to establish the Institute of Child Welfare and provide for a research and administrative staff, a nursery school for 30 children, an infant home (a project which never came to fruition), an extension worker, and research equipment. John Anderson was recruited from Yale’s psychology faculty to serve as the first director and he assembled an interdisciplinary group of researchers from departments across the University: pediatrics, anatomy, psychology, educational psychology, sociology, home economics, extension, and the psychopathic department at the University’s hospital.
ICD's big questions about child development
For 100 years, ICD researchers have asked questions about how people develop. While the questions may change over time, we remain motivated by the desire to improve the lives of children and families. Here are just some of the big questions that we have sought to answer:
"Why are childhood relationships so important?"
"What goes on in the mind of a child?"
"How do children learn about the physical world?"
"How do we nurture children?"
"How do we become who we become?"
"Can children thrive regardless of adversity?"
The Institute’s finances languished during the Great Depression and World War II and it was unknown whether it would survive or be slowly dismantled as funding from the LSRM wrapped up. Through funding from the state legislature, the Institute gradually grew its budget and made several new faculty appointments. After seeing the Institute through those challenges, John Anderson resigned as director in 1954.
W. Andrew Collins, professor emeritus who served as director of the Institute from 1982-1989, thinks Anderson would be pleased with the ways in which faculty have progressed our understanding of how a child’s changing environment affects their development.
“We have to keep renewing our understanding of [the developmental process] through careful specification of what the environmental challenges are at any given time,” says Collins. “I think John Anderson was very wise in foreseeing that as the likely progress of the field. And I think he was very futuristic in describing what it will continue to be like as new environmental challenges confront families and children.”
ICD by the numbers
The Institute’s finances languished during the Great Depression and World War II and it was unknown whether it would survive or be slowly dismantled as funding from the LSRM wrapped up. Through funding from the state legislature, the Institute gradually grew its budget and made several new faculty appointments. After seeing the Institute through those challenges, John Anderson resigned as director in 1954.
W. Andrew Collins, professor emeritus who served as director of the Institute from 1982-1989, thinks Anderson would be pleased with the ways in which faculty have progressed our understanding of how a child’s changing environment affects their development.
“We have to keep renewing our understanding of [the developmental process] through careful specification of what the environmental challenges are at any given time,” says Collins. “I think John Anderson was very wise in foreseeing that as the likely progress of the field. And I think he was very futuristic in describing what it will continue to be like as new environmental challenges confront families and children.”
Becoming an academic department
Anderson had started working on reorganizing the Institute’s contributions to the University’s new clinical child psychology graduate program (begun in 1952), which was administered by the Department of Psychology. Around the same time, University administration also asked the Institute to affiliate itself with a college, which took several years to resolve.
The Institute faculty desired to become part of the College of Science, Literature, and the Arts (CSLA), which had requested the creation of child psychology as an undergraduate major that launched at the Institute in 1955. However, the Institute’s programs in nursery education and parent education seemed a better fit with the College of Education, and ultimately a task force determined that the Institute would join the College of Education in 1957, but would maintain the child psychology undergraduate program in what is now the College of Liberal Arts (CLA). This is what led to the unique arrangement that exists today: ICD is housed within the College of Education and Human Development, where it offers undergraduate and graduate programs in early childhood education and master’s and doctoral programs in developmental psychology. ICD’s undergraduate developmental psychology major is still part of CLA.
“It is really unique that the early childhood department is housed inside of developmental psychology, but I believe that is something that really benefits our University students,” says Sheila Williams Ridge, the director of the Child Development Laboratory School and an instructor in the early childhood education program.
Currently, ICD’s developmental psychology undergraduate program enrolls approximately 250 majors and 120 minors each academic year. The early childhood undergraduate program enrolls approxmately 60 students a year.
“The legacy of the laboratory school ... really led us to an early childhood degree program,” says Kathleen Thomas, William Harris Professor of Child Development and the current director of ICD. “But the need to understand the science of development really sparked the research capacity and the scientific study of children in developmental psychology. And so now we’re the lucky recipients of having both of these programs that co-inform one another.”
In 1957, the Institute was renamed the Institute of Child Development and Welfare (“welfare” was dropped in 1963). Harold Stevenson, an educational psychologist, was recruited as director in 1959 and immediately began rebuilding the faculty. Stevenson made several notable hires, including early childhood education expert Shirley G. Moore as the director of the nursery school, and a bevy of new faculty who would mainly stay at the Institute for many decades. This new generation of faculty allowed ICD to expand its research areas to include learning and cognitive development, language development, perceptual development, social and personality development, and child clinical psychology.
Stevenson left the University in 1971 and Willard Hartup, recruited from the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station, took over as director. Hartup, who died in 2023, spoke about Stevenson’s leadership in a 1994 interview for the Society for Research in Child Development:
“Harold Stevenson’s vision was almost impossible for me to resist.... I mean, there was, ‘We’re going to do it, by God. We’re going to make a difference.’ And that atmosphere pervaded during the first ten years. The atmosphere of building, of constructing something for the field.”
It felt like we were living child development in a very special sense.
A shifting field spurs collaboration
Collins recalls joining ICD in 1971, when a new generation of scholars mingled with founding faculty.
“Some had been early members of the Institute, like [child language specialist] Mildred Templin and [psychologist] Merrill Roff,” he says. “And then others had just been on the faculty for a few years ... So it was easy to relate to everyone in some way. There was a lot of history to appreciate from the beginning.”
Collins also recalls that the presence of the nursery school enlivened the whole building.
“Every day was colored a little bit by the sounds coming from the nursery school,” he says. “It felt like we were living child development in a very special sense.”
Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, the Institute was also adjusting to a significant shift in focus within the field of psychology, from behavior and cognition to bio-behavioral processes, laying the groundwork for a “cells-to-society approach,” says Gunnar, a psychobiologist who joined the faculty in 1979.
In 1975, the Parent-Child Project, a groundbreaking study on early caregiving and attachment, was launched at ICD. The study followed 267 women in the third trimester of pregnancy who were living in poverty. Now known as the Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation, the study continues to this day and is widely regarded as a decisive development in research on attachment theory and the connections to social relationships and mental health later in life.
Collins, one of many researchers who has contributed to the study, says that, “... I’m reminded that one of the best things about being at the Institute is the encouragement of collegiality and collaboration.”
The collaborative spirit also sparked new approaches to the application of developmental science. With the creation of Head Start at the national level in 1965 and the Early Childhood Family Education program in Minnesota in the 1970s, there was a growing demand for dissemination of child development research to the public, particularly to the early childhood workforce. A group of faculty and staff at the University, including Moore and then-educational psychology Professor Richard Weinberg, began discussing ways to “give away child development.” This led to the creation of the Center for Early Education and Development (CEED) in 1973, a major hub of scholarship, advocacy, and professional development for the early childhood workforce. CEED celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2023.
There was also an effort to establish a formal partnership between ICD and the Department of Psychology for the child psychology clinical training program. A joint program between both departments began accepting students in 1991. Students can now enroll in a developmental psychopathology and clinical science track within ICD’s doctoral program and complete their clinical training in the psychology department. Ann Masten, Regents Professor and director of ICD from 1999 to 2005, says this program has contributed greatly to Minnesota, because many of these trained researchers and clinicians stay in the community after completing their degrees.
“We really are known, not just for developmental psychopathology, but also for a focus on strengths and resilience that has really permeated both theory and practice all over the world,” says Masten.
“There’s been a dramatic shift, and a lot of [that came] from the strength of the joint faculty and the students they trained and the research that was conducted here.”
From nursery school to child development laboratory school
The same year it was founded, the Institute launched one of the first laboratory schools in the country, and it has been in continuous operation since then. Laboratory schools are university-affiliated education programs that allow aspiring educators to gain experience in real classrooms. These special programs also offer child development researchers the opportunity to conduct studies in a “living lab.” And of course, a central purpose of lab schools is to provide an exceptional environment for early learning.
1925
Laboratory Nursery School was opened by the Institute in the YMCA/Publications Building. From its founding, the school was central to ICD’s mission of research and training.
1928
The Institute opened a kindergarten, which was transferred to the University Elementary School in 1959.
1955
The laboratory school moved to the building that housed the Institute of Child Development and Welfare, later renamed the Institute of Child Development.
1960
Professor Shirley G. Moore became the director of the lab school and established a more modern curriculum to reflect best practices in cognitive, social, emotional, and physical development. Moore served as the director until 1979.
1987
The University Board of Regents renamed the facility in honor of Professor Emeritus Shirley G. Moore’s significant contributions to the field of early childhood education. During Professor Moore’s 13 years as director of the school, it became widely known as a research laboratory and a center for the training of early childhood educators.
2021
The Shirley G. Moore Laboratory School and the University of Minnesota Child Development Center, which was founded in 1974, merged to form the Child Development Laboratory School (CDLS).
2022
CDLS opened a second preschool program, the Dakhódiapi Wahóȟpi or Dakota Language Nest, which is a language immersion program welcoming children from the community ages 3 to 5.
A global impact
ICD’s reputation as a research powerhouse continued to grow globally, showcased in events like the biennial Minnesota Symposium on Child Psychology, which has drawn hundreds of speakers over the decades and attracts international visitors.
“The Institute of Child Development is a rarity,” says Weinberg, who joined the ICD faculty in 1987 and became director in 1989. “And there are so many people that one can be thankful to for having created that. There’s a reason why it’s ranked number one in the country. I have to say in the world, because I can’t imagine there’d be anyplace better. It’s that appreciation of individual differences, the appreciation of scholarship, and the appreciation of new ideas that has been critical.”
In 1999, Masten became ICD’s first female director. She says that ICD has been able to attract faculty over the past several decades who bring expertise in neurobiological and neurodevelopmental research, which has led to a field of study in which brain imaging can be used to examine neurodevelopmental conditions such as ADHD and autism spectrum disorder.
Masten also says that the direction of the field has moved toward a “big science” approach and there are several current faculty members who are working on these types of national research projects that involve multi-site research teams collecting data from thousands of children and adolescents.
She says that new technology allows researchers to examine questions concerning child development in ways that will hopefully address society’s greatest challenges.
“From my point of view, we [are in] a very stressful period of history,” Masten says. “We have the largest number of refugees in the history of the world right now. We have conflict all over the world. We have the impending crisis of climate change coming quickly on the heels of a global pandemic that we didn’t anticipate. In that world, we have to get our act together. We have to work together to protect children, to promote positive development in a fragmented world that’s really quite stressful right now.”
Building for the next generation
In the 2000s, attention began to turn to the condition of ICD’s 1903-era building with its 1969 addition that had not kept up with the department’s growth. The Institute had maintained its vaunted research reputation despite its aging and decrepit building, but there were concerns that faculty recruitment would be challenged by the physical space. When Gunnar became director in 2011, she says she was determined to “get us a new building.”
Years of advocacy came to fruition in 2020. Gov. Tim Walz and Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan, BA ‘02, an undergraduate alumna of the Institute, were instrumental in drawing attention to the urgent need. With the support of University administration and private donors, $29.2 million in state funds and substantial private funds were secured to begin the $43.8 million renovation and construction process to transform the old building into Carmen D. and James R. Campbell Hall—ICD’s new home, which opened in 2022.
“Now we have this fabulous building,” Gunnar says. “This building is the Institute. It’s happy for kids. It’s got light. And it’s just beautiful. So I’m very, very happy about that.”
While the building campaign was ongoing, a new idea was also brewing that would build on ICD’s strengths in normative brain development and developmental psychopathology. In partnership with the Medical School and CEHD, ICD played a significant role in developing and launching the Masonic Institute for the Developing Brain in 2021. This new interdisciplinary institute brings together experts in neuroscience, brain imaging, pediatrics, developmental psychology, psychiatry, and child development to advance research and clinical practice that support children’s brain and behavioral development.
“This is really now the powerhouse for studying human brain and behavioral development,” Gunnar says. “We are really positioned to revolutionize the field of developmental psychopathology and the role of pediatric health in mental health.”
ICD’s renewal, both in physical space and a once-again growing faculty, came at an opportune time. When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, the department was in the process of moving into temporary office and research spaces so construction could begin.
“Every single classroom had to move to a remote context,” says Thomas, who began serving as ICD’s director in summer 2020. “We had to shut down all in-person research. Many faculty ... had to pivot to figure out new and creative ways to try to do their research without destroying the scientific method of their project. It was incredibly challenging. But I’m really excited about all of the innovations that have come out of that time ... We learned a lot about our resilience, about new ways that we could take advantage of remote learning, and the challenges of those environments.”
Alongside the pandemic, the ICD community also had to process the murder of George Floyd in May 2020. The awakening to racial injustice that spread across the globe prompted faculty, staff, and students to think critically about how the department and the field of developmental psychology should respond.
“It really was a moment in time when our faculty and students came together to say, ‘This is important to us. These ideas of diversity, of multiple perspectives ... of an anti-racist society are critical to who we are and what we stand for at the Institute of Child Development’,” Thomas says. “And the work that we’re doing in developmental science is founded on the idea that we must support all children to develop in positive ways. And if that’s not happening, then we need to take action.”
Thomas pointed to research at ICD on the influence of adversities like racism, discrimination, and poverty on developmental processes. ICD researchers are well positioned to “use multiple levels of analysis—at the family level and at the societal level—to understand these ideas,” she says.
...the work that we're doing in developmental science is founded on the idea that we must support all children to develop in positive ways.
A hope for a new equitable future
“When I think about what our founding director had to say, I think he was right on in terms of what we would learn that would improve the welfare of children,” Masten says. “We know now what matters for healthy development ... We’ve made great advances in some areas, like the health of the world’s children is better on the whole than it was 100 years ago ... Our next big problem is how do we address inequality and disparity and discrimination and the fact that so many of the world’s resources for child development are being focused on a tiny portion of the world. So I think we’ve got our work cut out for us.”
ICD continues to invest in its mission to: advance research about human development, promote the optimal development of all children, instruct students in developmental science and early education, and collaborate with communities to implement science that improves lives. In addition to the long-standing
undergraduate and graduate programs in developmental psychology and early childhood education, ICD also launched an online master’s degree program in applied child and adolescent development in 2018, attracting students from around the world who aim to work in advocacy, community, and health care settings. Past and present leaders of the Institute agree that their predecessors’ dedication to advancing developmental science laid the foundation for future generations of students, researchers, and faculty to pose new questions, create new methodologies, and meet society’s challenges—today and in the future.
- LORA HORGEN
More ICD history
Get highlights of ICD's 100 year history, including video interviews and additional images.
This is why I give: Ann Masten This is why I give: Ann Masten
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Upcoming event: ICD's Centennial Celebration
Join us for ICD’s Centennial Celebration
Friday, May 2, 2025, 5:30-8:30 p.m.
Carmen D. and James R. Campbell Hall