Days of Future Passed: On the Prescient Relational Developmental Systems Vision of Fred W. Vondracek

Abstract

The scholarship that Fred W. Vondracek and his colleagues and students produced in the early to mid-1980s contributed in fundamental ways to framing a vision for both the process-relational paradigm and for relational developmental systems (RDS) metatheory-based models of human development derived from it. We provide an overview of RDS metatheory and review Vondracek’s vision for developmental science, explaining that his use of a model of individual - context relations enabled depiction of how an individual’s contributions to his or her context might be a source of the person’s own positive, healthy development. We illustrate the usefulness of such individual - context models through a discussion of the Lerner and Lerner “Five Cs” model of positive youth development. This illustration affords the conclusion that the career contributions of Fred Vondracek enrich the ability of developmental scientists to describe, explain, and optimize the development of diverse individuals across the life span.