Coping, Developmental Influences

Whether it is the stress of separating from a loved one, the experience of failure, or witnessing a life-threatening event, coping is necessary from the first to the last days of life. Coping describes the transactional processes through which people deal with actual problems in their everyday lives and includes such strategies as problem solving, social support seeking, distraction, and escape. Although coping has been considered an individual affair, influenced largely by personal resources (such as efficacy or optimism), it is clear that coping is profoundly social in nature. Social environments (such as families) can create stress. They shape the specific demands to which people will be exposed or from which they will be sheltered. Social relationships are the contexts through which stressors are filtered and from which coping resources may be drawn. Moreover, social partners may be directly involved in individuals' coping interactions, and they form the back-up systems that will protect people (or leave them vulnerable) when their own coping capacities prove inadequate.

Not only do social contexts and relationships shape how people cope at every age, but they also influence how coping develops. Recent theoretical and empirical progress in the field has facilitated the study of the reciprocal connections between personal relationships and coping. This entry provides a brief overview of emerging conceptualizations of coping as a backdrop for explaining the multiple levels at which social contexts and interpersonal relationships shape how coping develops. The entry focuses on infancy, childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood.