A Critical Developmental Approach to Studying Youth in Multispecies Contexts

Non-human animals are ubiquitous in the lives of youth. Yet most theory and research on adolescent development are anthropocentric, focusing almost exclusively on youth's relationships with human others. Given that many adolescents worldwide grow up alongside non-human animals, this omission is not simply a theoretical gap but a misrepresentation of the multispecies conditions in which development unfolds. In this paper, I invite developmental psychologists to (re)imagine adolescence through a multispecies lens. I show how such an approach disrupts speciesism within the discipline of human development and expands existing understandings of adolescence as a socially constructed phase of life. I then outline four starting places for multispecies-inclusive developmental inquiry: (1) recognizing non-human animals as social actors; (2) centering youth voices; (3) understanding development as relationally constituted within multispecies geographies; and (4) situating multispecies relations within social structures. Centering non-human animals opens the way to an expansive and ecologically grounded account of adolescence.