Do Children Develop, or Do They Just Grow Up?

This essay is a comment to the article of Peter Bodor in the same volume. Bodor’s main point that in developmental psychology childhood is less and less regarded as an evolutionary process. My purpose is to show that the abandonment of the concept of development from the study of childhood has a longer history. William Kessen, a professor of Yale university and his students were highly critical with piagetian theory of development already in the middle of 1980-ies. Though not everybody shared their views, mostly Kessen’s group’s conceptions determined childhood research in the recent past. The exceptional reputation of the American psychology gained after the Second World War undoubtedly contributed in that. From the late 80ties, especially after the political changes Hungarian experts of child development joined the „main stream” conceptions of childhood unconditionally, without criticism. Isolated attempts (like the mine more than ten years ago) failed to draw attention to the changes in the concept of development in childhood and to generate a debate on the subject. In this paper I am also referring to those supposed reasons of the deflation of the developmental concept that go beyond the science. In the postmodern global world differences between children and adults are decreasing also in everyday life. Special characteristics of the children which had been subjects to study for developmental psychology formerly are no more important for the contemporary society. The problem is not that this situation is reflected in the science, but the lack of critical aspects from the scientific interpretation.