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Chapter 31 - Big and Small Fishes and Their Ponds

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 February 2025

By
Linda M. Richter
Edited by
Frank Kessel
Frank Kessel
Affiliation:
University of New Mexico
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Summary

From a lower middle-class family in a small mining town in South Africa, a series of opportunities created by mentors in South Africa and abroad, together with the grit and daring to take them up, enabled me to work with some of the most innovative developmental theorists, such as Colwyn Trevarthen, and global policy figures like Jim Yong Kim, former President of the World Bank. I used these opportunities to shape a research and advocacy career that brought together knowledge and evidence relating to young children and families from a wide range of disciplines to contribute to global, regional, and national policy and programs to address the universal and enduring problems of poverty, inequality and social exclusion that limit children’s chances in life. I am extremely gratified that some of my students, assistants, and early career collaborators, driven by their talents and encouraged by my nerve, have similarly carved out global careers starting from provincial beginnings.

Keywords

South Africabirth cohortadult-infant interactionearly childhood developmentnutrition and growthpolicy
Type
Chapter
Information
Pillars of Developmental Psychology
Recollections and Reflections
 , pp. 349 - 360
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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References

Suggested Reading

Barbarin, O. & Richter, L. (2001). Mandela’s Children: Growing up in Post-Apartheid South Africa. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Richter, L. (1995). Are early adult-infant interactions universal: A South African view. South African Journal of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 7(1), 2–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/16826108.1995.9632452.Google Scholar
Richter, L. (2004). The Importance of Caregiver-Child Interactions for the Survival and Healthy Development of Young Children. Geneva: World Health Organization.Google Scholar
Richter, L. (2022). Birth to Thirty: A Study as Ambitious as the Country We Wanted to Create. Reach Publishers and the DSI-NRF Centre of Excellence, University of the Witwatersrand.Google Scholar
Richter, L. M., Cappa, C., Issa, G., Lu, C., Petrowski, N., & Naicker, S. N. (2020). Data for action on early childhood development. The Lancet, 396(10265), 1784–1786. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)32482-X.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Richter, L. & Dawes, A. (2008). A history of South African psychological research on child development. In van Ommen, C. & Painter, D. (Eds.), Interiors: A History of Psychology in South Africa (pp. 286–323). Cape Town: UCT Press & Juta.Google Scholar
Richter, L., Victora, C., Hallal, P., Adair, L., Bhargava, S., Fall, C., Martorell, R., Lee, N., Norris, S., Stein, A., and the COHORTS group (2011). Cohort profile: The Consortium of Health Research in Transitioning Societies (COHORTS). International Journal of Epidemiology. https://doi.org.10.1093/ije/dyq251.Google Scholar

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