Although studies suggest that coping is central to students’ learning and achievement, and open to influence from personal and interpersonal factors, research also paints a troubling picture of normative development: During primary school, students’ coping follows a constructive trajectory, but in early adolescence, maladaptive coping rises abruptly while adaptive strategies decline; and students do not fully recover from these losses by the end of the teenage years. To make sense of these trends, we argue for a systems conceptualization that defines coping as “action regulation under stress,” and embeds action in a larger multi-level coping system. To illustrate the utility of this approach, we explore five ways it can offer insights about how social partners and ecologies can foster the healthy development of students’ academic coping. We hope to contribute to a shift to more developmental and systems-oriented conceptualizations, which we believe can better inform intervention efforts and guide future study of the development of academic coping.