Most people have a sense of being actively involved in shaping their lives. They follow developmental paths that are coherent interms of identifying and effectively pursuing long-term goals and, when necessary, disengaging from goals that are no longer attainable. Even when confronted with setbacks, disappointments, and failures, humans have a remarkable capacity to stay on course and maintain a sense of personal agency. Our approach to the regulation of life-span development focuses on the impressive adaptive capacity of individuals to optimize development across major changes in the life course.
The past 15 years of conceptual and empirical work have shown that a central feature of adaptive capacity is the regulation of motivation. An individual’s developmental potential is won or lost by mastering the challenges of regulating motivational processes. This is accomplished by selecting, pursuing, and adapting developmental and personal goals to reflect changes in life-course opportunities, staying ahead of the game by anticipating emergent opportunities for goal pursuits, activating behavioral and motivational strategies of goal engagement, disengaging from goals that have become futile and too costly, and replacing them with more appropriate goals. In the early 1990s, we set out to capture these phenomena of adaptive regulation of development by proposing a life-span theory of control.
This theory focused on the role of the individual as an active agent in life-span development, the distinction between primary and secondary control strategies, and the proposition that primary control striving holds functional primacy in the motivational system, and the idea of selectivity and compensation as fundamental requirements of optimizing life course development.
In societies with a highly specialized labor force and substantial social mobility, chronological age itself