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Increasingly, developmental scientists and clinical psychologists are being called on to suggest implications of basic research for intervention design and public policy. The critical difference between clinical psychology and public policy in unit of analysis (individual vs. population) leads to a fundamental conundrum. As psychologists, we are concerned with the study of individual differences and development—which highlights contextual subtleties—whereas policy is a blunt instrument that weighs relative costs and benefits in order to have the largest impact. It is important that we not confuse scientific information about outcomes with our valuing of those outcomes. Our job is to provide objective information about the potential developmental impacts of certain policies (in as many domains as possible). As scientists, we can influence policy analysis (the systematic consideration of relative costs and benefits), but have little role in policy making (related to preferences and value judgments). Challenges to policy work include the fact that policy is culture of action, there is pressure to help even prematurely, there are risks of promising too much and seductiveness of having influence, and the ongoing split between science and practice. Thus, before large longitudinal studies of human development can have significant impact on social policy, several scientific, ethical, and cultural issues must be resolved. There are concerns about: trade-off in breadth vs. depth of measurement; conflicts between collecting confidential information and the requirement for public access to data; giving less credit to the “data designer and collector” than to the data analyst; conflict between the academic culture of single-investigator credit and multiple-investigator teams; and maintaining investigator-initiated science in the context of government-led studies. A final difficulty is how to make single study results applicable to policy, as this requires generalization across groups, contexts, cultures, and periods (e.g., class size). Nonetheless, there are opportunities for longitudinal researchers who are interested in public policy, including: government-funded studies (e.g., Ad-Health, NLSY, NICHD day care); adding questions about policy issues (e.g., welfare, child care) to study design; conducting randomized trials (by paying attention to issues of scale and framing); taking advantage of “natural experiments” (e.g., variability in age at transition to middle school/beginning kindergarten, local custody practices, rules about grade retention). A final point is that studies of the effects of policy can also inform theories of individual development.