David Elkind

Introduction

David Elkind (born March 11, 1931) is an American child psychologist who gave two ideas to the English language. The first, from a 1967 paper, is adolescent egocentrism — the claim that teenagers construct an imaginary audience that watches them constantly and a personal fable that makes them feel unique and invulnerable. The second, from his 1981 book The Hurried Child, is that modern society pushes children through childhood too fast, trading play for instruction and producing stress rather than achievement.

Both ideas are Piagetian in origin and both are aimed at the public as much as at the profession. Elkind describes himself as an applied developmental psychologist: someone who takes theory into schools and legislatures and brings what he finds there back into theory. For fifty years he has been the psychologist most likely to be quoted in a magazine article about why children should be allowed to play.

Early Life and Education

Elkind was born in Detroit, Michigan, and moved with his family to California as a teenager. He studied at the University of California, Los Angeles, taking a bachelor's degree in 1952 and a doctorate in 1955.

His route into developmental psychology ran through psychodynamics. After the doctorate he spent a year as a research assistant to David Rapaport at the Austen Riggs Center in Stockbridge, Massachusetts, a psychoanalytic hospital, and it was there that he first encountered the work of Jean Piaget. The combination defined his career: he spent the rest of it trying to join psychodynamic thinking about the inner life to Piaget's account of cognitive structure, and then applying the result to education and to social policy.

In 1964–65 he held a National Science Foundation Senior Postdoctoral Fellowship at Piaget's Institut d'Epistémologie Génétique in Geneva. He was, in the ordinary sense, Piaget's student, and his research programme for the following two decades was an attempt to test and extend Piagetian theory in areas Piaget had not covered — perceptual development, religious belief, and the social cognition of adolescents.

Academic and Professional Career

Elkind taught first at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, then at UCLA, the University of Denver, and the University of Rochester, where he was professor of psychology, psychiatry and education. In the 1980s he moved to Tufts University as professor in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Study and Human Development, serving as department chair and later as professor emeritus. He received an honorary doctorate of science from Rhode Island College in 1987.

He served as president of the National Association for the Education of Young Children, sat on the editorial boards of numerous journals, consulted to state education departments and federal agencies, and became one of the small number of psychologists with a genuine public presence: appearances on the Today show, the CBS Morning News, Nightline, Donahue and Oprah, profiles in People and Boston Magazine, and a co-hosting role on the Lifetime series Kids These Days. He was a contributing editor at Parents magazine.

His bibliography runs to roughly 500 items, including eighteen books and, alongside the research, a body of popular work — children's stories, biographies of psychologists for the New York Times Magazine, and articles in Good Housekeeping and Psychology Today.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Adolescent egocentrism

Elkind's 1967 paper in Child Development argued that a specific cognitive change at adolescence produces a specific kind of error. The formal-operational adolescent can think about other people's thoughts, which is new. But the new capacity is not yet under control, and the adolescent fails to distinguish what others are actually thinking about from what he himself is preoccupied with. The result is an under-differentiation: he assumes that everyone is attending to the thing he cannot stop thinking about — his appearance, his embarrassment, his failure.

That is the imaginary audience. Elkind used it to explain self-consciousness, the wish for privacy, hours in front of the mirror, faddish dress, conformity to peer norms, and delinquent acts performed for an audience that exists only in the actor's head.

The personal fable is the corresponding over-differentiation. If he is important enough to be watched by everyone, he must be special; and if he is special, the ordinary rules do not apply to him. Elkind connected this to the keeping of diaries, to short-lived and intense romances, and to risk-taking — unprotected sex, reckless driving, substance use — in which an adolescent behaves as though consequences were for other people.

Both phenomena were supposed to fade as formal operations consolidate and as genuine intimacy teaches the adolescent that others have their own preoccupations. Elkind also proposed the practical corollary: if delinquency is driven by an imaginary audience, then helping a young person distinguish the real audience from the invented one should reduce it.

The hurried child

The Hurried Child: Growing Up Too Fast Too Soon (1981, with later editions in 1988, 2001 and a twenty-fifth anniversary edition in 2007) argued that children were being given the curriculum, the clothing, the entertainment and the responsibilities of older children and adults before they had the developmental equipment for them. Elkind's target was "pushing down" — moving academic instruction into preschool, replacing free play with structured activity, and treating early childhood as preparation for the next stage rather than as a stage with its own work.

He built the argument on Piaget: if cognitive structures develop in sequence, then instruction delivered before the relevant structure is available produces rote performance rather than understanding, along with stress that shows up in behaviour. His later books extended the argument to teenagers (All Grown Up and No Place to Go, 1984, 1998), to the imbalance of the modern family (Ties That Stress, 1994), and to the value of unstructured play (The Power of Play, 2007).

Perceptual and religious development

The less-remembered part of Elkind's research is his work on perception and on children's religious thinking. He studied how children's figure-ground perception and their ability to handle part-whole relations develop, and he applied Piagetian methods to children's conceptions of God and of religious identity — work that reads now as an early example of taking children's own reasoning seriously as reasoning, whatever its content.

Major Publications

  • Elkind, D. (1967). Egocentrism in adolescence. Child Development, 38(4), 1025–1034.
  • Elkind, D., & Bowen, R. (1979). Imaginary audience behavior in children and adolescents. Developmental Psychology, 15(1), 38–44.
  • Elkind, D. (1981). The Hurried Child: Growing Up Too Fast Too Soon. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
  • Elkind, D. (1984). All Grown Up and No Place to Go: Teenagers in Crisis. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.
  • Elkind, D. (1985). Egocentrism redux. Developmental Review, 5(3), 218–226.
  • Elkind, D. (1994). Ties That Stress: The New Family Imbalance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
  • Elkind, D. (2007). The Power of Play: Learning What Comes Naturally. Philadelphia, PA: Da Capo Press.

Impact and Legacy

Elkind's two ideas travelled by very different routes. The hurried child entered the language of parents and teachers and reshaped early-childhood practice: developmentally appropriate practice is now the default assumption in the field he addressed, and the pushback against academic preschool is largely his. The concept has also been criticised as a recurring moral panic — every generation since the 1950s has been told that children are growing up too fast, and the claim is nearly unfalsifiable because the standard for "too fast" is set by the critic.

Adolescent egocentrism had a different fate: it entered every textbook and then lost much of its empirical footing. The problem is that the theory's central mechanism has not been confirmed. The predicted peak of egocentrism in the early phase of formal operations, and its decline once those abilities consolidate, appeared in only a few studies. Many studies found no association between formal operations and egocentrism; a few found egocentrism highest during the concrete operational stage and declining thereafter; one found a negative correlation with formal operations. Elkind himself never measured formal-operational thinking in his own research on the topic, which leaves the hypothesis that generated the theory untested by its author.

The pattern with age is equally inconsistent. Some studies find the predicted decline across adolescence; others find egocentrism rising with age; others find none; and at least one found no difference between adolescents and adults aged 19 to 30 — which would make the phenomenon not adolescent at all. Systematic gender differences also sit badly with a purely cognitive explanation: girls report more imaginary-audience ideation, boys more personal-fable ideation, in a pattern that looks more like socialisation than like the unfolding of logical structures.

The most successful replacement is the "New Look" model developed by Daniel Lapsley and colleagues, who had pressed the theoretical critique in a direct exchange with Elkind in Developmental Review in 1985. On that account, the imaginary audience and the personal fable are not cognitive errors at all but interpersonal fantasies generated by the work of separation-individuation — the adolescent's simultaneous need to pull away from parents and stay connected to them. The New Look model predicts correlations with separation concerns that the cognitive model does not, and it has more empirical support than the theory it replaced.

A further problem is measurement. The two standard instruments operationalise the imaginary audience as self-consciousness and as concern with anticipating others' reactions. Neither requires the misperception that is supposed to be the construct: a person can be correctly observed and correctly worried about it. When Lorraine Vartanian tested the construct more directly, asking participants to judge ambiguous peer-group conversations, about one in five participants across four age groups — children through young adults — concluded the group was talking about them, and adolescents were no more likely than adults to do so. What predicted the judgment was whether the remarks were read as admiring, not the age of the person reading them.

None of this has removed the terms from the vocabulary, and there is a reason: the phenomena Elkind described are recognisable to anyone who has been a teenager or raised one. What the evidence supports is a weaker claim than the one he made — that adolescents think about themselves in social scenarios, not that a stage of logical development produces a specific cognitive error.

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References

  • Elkind, D. (1967). Egocentrism in adolescence. Child Development, 38(4), 1025-1034.

Last updated: 2026-10-20

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