Stories of development and change

This chapter outlines a selection of theories of child and adolescent development and their influence on educational practice and school counselling. It tells a story of the shift from post-war human interrelatedness in Bowlby, Winnicott and Rogers to recent, almost ‘transhuman’ developmental process between adolescent and technology, which is presented apocalyptically in Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness and with more optimistic agency in books like Nicole Vignola’s Rewire: Break the Cycle, Alter Your Thoughts and Create Lasting Change. It goes on to provide a summary of the development of school counselling in English state schools and the significance of their representation in popular culture.