With Development and Parenting at Heart: Over 100 Years of Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology

Clinical psychology has focused on children and adolescents since its emergence in the 19th century, shaped largely by educational and healthcare demands. While historians have documented these influences, less attention has been paid to how broader developments in psychology affected the discipline itself, and to how evidence beyond established narratives could be leveraged to chart out the discipline’s evolution, diagnose its current state, and forecast possible futures. In search of such evidence, we used a bibliometric approach combining sources from specialized journals indexed in Web of Science and Scopus with literature published under related disciplinary labels. Using topic modeling, co-occurrence and co-citation network analyses spanning 1905–2025, and trend analyses spanning 1980–2025, we traced changes in research topics, methods, and theoretical orientations. The findings revealed a globally expanding discipline, shaped by all DSM versions, with a persistent focus on typical development, parenting, and assessment. Interest in therapy, brain disorders, and Down syndrome, once strong, declined over time. Highly cited works emphasized methodological approaches (both quantitative and qualitative assessment tools paired with a multi-informant approach) rather than theory (with, e.g., attachment theory absent from such works), suggesting a growing divide between theoretical orientations and research practice.