The Development of Accommodative Coping

The concept of accommodative coping refers to a "family" of processes by which goal blockages, losses, and similar threats to quality of life are coped with by adjusting individual goal and valuation structures, i.e., in particular by devaluing or "letting go" of threatened or blocked goals and upgrading and pursuing alternative, more attainable goals in their place. While the functionality of accommodative regulatory processes in older and older adulthood has long been elaborated theoretically in several compatible modeling approaches and well studied empirically, accommodative processes in childhood and adolescence have only recently attracted scientific attention. It is helpful here to distinguish the efficacy of accommodative processes in childhood and adolescence itself from the developmental conditions for accommodative processes in adulthood and old age. Combining these perspectives opens up the prospect of an actual lifespan perspective on developmental regulation.