{"id":13122,"date":"2026-06-08T12:32:04","date_gmt":"2026-06-08T12:32:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/siliconvalleymovingpost.com\/?p=13122"},"modified":"2026-06-08T12:32:04","modified_gmt":"2026-06-08T12:32:04","slug":"psychiatrist-robert-coles-pulitzer-prize-winning-author-who-championed-needs-of-children-dies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/siliconvalleymovingpost.com\/?p=13122","title":{"rendered":"Psychiatrist Robert Coles, Pulitzer Prize-winning author who championed needs of children, dies"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Harvard University professor Robert Coles, the psychiatrist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author who championed the cause of children grappling with poverty and segregation, has died at 97, his son said Sunday.<\/p>\n

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The son, also named Robert Coles, told The Associated Press that his father died Thursday at a hospice center in Lincoln, Massachusetts.<\/p>\n

The elder Coles was famed for documenting the needs of children, particularly those caught in the crucible of social upheaval. The second and third parts of his five-volume \u201cChildren of Crisis\u201d won him a Pulitzer Prize in 1973 for general nonfiction.<\/p>\n

In a 1965 Washington Post essay, he wrote that, expecting to find many psychiatric problems among the children of poverty, that instead \u201cI was constantly surprised at the endurance shown by children we would all call poor or, in the current fashion, \u2018culturally disadvantaged.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat enabled such children from such families to survive emotionally and educationally ordeals I feel sure many white middle-class boys and girls would find impossible?\u201d<\/p>\n

He would visit the same families repeatedly in order to get to know them well, and brought along crayons to allow the children he studied to draw pictures about their experiences and perceptions.<\/p>\n

He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998. He also was one of the first recipients of a MacArthur Foundation \u201cgenius grant.\u201d In 1999, a panel of judges ranked \u201cChildren of Crisis\u201d as No. 44 on its list of the century\u2019s 100 best English-language works of nonfiction.<\/p>\n

The \u201cChildren of Crisis\u201d books came out from 1967 to 1978. His first book focused on the effects of desegregation on children. The second looked at life among migrant workers, sharecroppers and others dwelling in mountain areas.<\/p>\n

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He subtitled the third volume \u201cThe South Goes North\u201d as it focused on both Black and white Southerners who moved into urban areas in the North. The fourth looked at children of Native American origin, as well as Alaska Natives and Hispanic children. A fifth volume examined children of wealth and privilege.<\/p>\n

His other books included \u201cTheir Eyes Meeting the World,\u201d exploring the meanings of children\u2019s drawings; \u201cThe Moral Life of Children,\u201d \u201cThe Political Life of Children\u201d and \u201cThe Spiritual Life of Children.\u201d He also wrote books on psychoanalyst Anna Freud and reformer Dorothy Day.<\/p>\n

While many of his books probed conditions in the United States, he also studied children around the world. In all, he wrote more than 50 books and hundreds of articles and essays.<\/p>\n

Some of his peers found his work to be more that of a reporter and advocate than that of a psychiatrist or scientist.<\/p>\n

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\u201cHe\u2019s a very good journalist who talks to kids sensitively and tells stories well,\u201d the late Harvard professor Lawrence Kohlberg, a leading authority on moral development, told AP in 1986. \u201cBut no psychiatrist would take what he says seriously.\u201d<\/p>\n

He had gotten interested in children\u2019s reaction to crises in the early 1960s while serving in the South as an Air Force doctor. He was particularly taken by Ruby Bridges, who was only 6 when she became the center of a storm of abuse as the first Black child in a previously all-white school in New Orleans.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe demonstrated moral stamina; she possessed honor, courage,\u201d he said in 1986. He even wrote a children\u2019s book about her, \u201cThe Story of Ruby Bridges,\u201d in 1995. (Ruby\u2019s heroism also caught the eye of artist Norman Rockwell, who depicted her brave entrance into the school in his 1964 work \u201cThe Problem We All Live With.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Coles\u2019 wife, Jane, helped out during the interviews with children.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt first the children were frightened to death of us \u2014 they\u2019d never had white people in their homes before,\u201d Coles told People magazine. \u201cBut I began to throw away my questions. I threw away my necktie. I began to sit on the floor.\u201d<\/p>\n

The 1995 PBS documentary \u201cListening to Children: A Moral Journey with Robert Coles\u201d showed him at work, interviewing a cross-section of American children and analyzing their drawings, as he had done in his books.<\/p>\n

\u201cA child is an opportunity and a moral challenge. How are we going to do justice to this new life with all its possibilities?\u201d he said. \u201cIf we fail as parents, we are failing also as citizens.\u201d<\/p>\n

Coles held a longtime appointment as a research psychiatrist at Harvard\u2019s University Health Services. In 1977, he was named professor of psychiatry and medical humanities, and in 1995, he was appointed as a professor of social ethics in the School of Education.<\/p>\n

In a popular Harvard class he taught called the Literature of Social Reflection \u2014 jokingly called \u201cGuilt 105\u201d \u2014 he stressed that \u201cwe should look inward and think about the meaning of our life and its purposes,\u201d he told People magazine in 1990.<\/p>\n

Born in Boston, Coles went on to graduate from Harvard in 1950. He received a medical degree from Columbia University\u2019s College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1954. A 1972 Time magazine cover profile said he became interested in psychiatry as \u201cthe most philosophical of the disciplines\u201d \u2014 and besides, he found he was unnerved when children cried when being vaccinated.<\/p>\n

He acknowledged that he and his own family lived well, telling The New York Times in 1997, \u201cIt makes me uncomfortable, seeing the disparities between the world I document and the world I inhabit.\u201d<\/p>\n

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His wife died in 1993. They had three sons.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Harvard University psychiatrist and author Robert Coles has died. 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