This chapter presents a summary of the career of Richard M. Lerner within the field that, during his professional life, changed its label from child psychology to developmental science. Lerner summarizes the influence of the scholars and the ideas they championed in shaping the breadth of his career, from his days as a doctoral student at the City University of New York in the late 1960s and early 1970s to the more than a quarter century he spent at Tufts University, where he served as the Bergstrom Chair in Applied Developmental Science and Director of the Institute for Applied Research in Youth Development. Lerner explains how the idea of mutually influential coactions between individuals and contexts (i.e., individual⬄context relations) found its roots in the comparative psychology work of T. C. Schneirla and evolved to become embedded in relational developmental systems-based models that emphasize the dynamic character of human development across the life span.

No form of biological life exists independent of other lives across its ontogeny. Among humans, mutually beneficial and adaptive (functional) development occurs when (1) an individual acts in ways that contribute to the well-being of the person’s social ecology, including the other individuals in the social world and the social institutions of this context, and (2) the social world supports the positive and healthy development of the individual. Within dynamic, relational developmental systems–based models of human development, these dynamic individual ⬄ individual/social institution relationships constitute adaptive developmental regulations and are the essence of prosociality. We present a dynamic model of the links among prosociality, positive youth development (PYD), and character virtue development. We present the theoretical rationale for the hypothesis that the enhancement of character virtue development through specific character education programs can provide the contextual conditions that, when aligned with an individual’s attributes of thriving, increase the likelihood that PYD and prosociality will be linked among youth.