Robert Richardson Sears

Professional life After leaving Yale, Sears was first an instructor in psychology at the University of Illinois Chicago from 1932 to 1936 and at the same time was a clinical psychologist at the Institute for Juvenile Research there. He returned to Yale as an associate professor of psychology in 1936 and remained there until 1942. Sears focused on the personalities of children and the different socialization pressures parents place on their child. He also said that the root of personalities in children stemmed from their family. Sears became the first person to have the child's own parent present in the experiments conducted. He wrote two books, Patterns of Child Rearing (1957) and Identification and Child Rearing (1965), where he explained some of his findings on the personality of a child. Sears established many research centers and institutions that allowed students and colleagues to study further. One of Sears' biggest achievements was founding the Bing Nursery School. This was a model preschool with a research facility for the child development unit at Stanford.

From 1949 until 1953 he directed the Laboratory of Human Development at the Harvard Graduate School of Education.

Select works Frustration and aggression (1939, with John Dollard, Leonard William Doob, Neal Elgar Miller, Orval Hobart Mowrer, ) Survey of objective studies of psychoanalytic concepts (1943, Social Science Research Council, ) Patterns of child rearing (1957, Eleanor E. Maccoby, Harry Levin, Edgar L. Lowell, Pauline Snedden Sears, and John W. M. Whiting, Jean Berwick, ) Identification and child rearing (1966, Lucy Rau Ferguson, Ram Dass, ) Seven Ages of Man (June 1973, S. Shirley Feldman, ) Your ancients revisited: A history of child development (1975, )