Life Span Psychology Week 6

     I often tell kids younger than fifteen, “don’t grow up to quickly, childhood is over before you know it.” Fundamentally I believe that, but I realized something this weekend after reading this week’s chapters and also reflecting on last week’s movie, the Education of Shelby Knox.  I think kids should enjoy their childhood, they should feel a certain amount of carefreeness, that comes with not paying bills, taking care of a family or worrying about a career, but somewhere in that brief period of childhood we have to gather the tools to be responsible adults.  After watching the focused, driven, Shelby Knox last week, I wondered how do you foster such a ‘together’ teenager?  I definitely was not Shelby Knox at fifteen, my biggest responsibility was to maintain a good grade point average and keep my room clean.  I’ve realized that lack of direction, being more focused on satisfying the needs of my parent over figuring out what my own likes and dislikes were, left me flailing as a young person in college.  I don’t think I realized that I was transitioning into adulthood as a young undergrad; I was still completely focused on doing what my parents asked of me.  If I could revisit that time I would have been more reflective on my own strengths and weaknesses, I probably would have become a teacher at least ten years sooner if I had.

     William Perry’s theories have been highly criticized because of his research entirely being done on males, but I can see how his thoughts on intellectual and ethical development have been present at different times of my life.  As a young adult, Perry believes that we think of things absolutely, concepts are either right or wrong, but as we progress through adulthood we start to think about things more critically, taking into consideration perspective and situation.  Although, at this point in my children’s life I would hope that they take what I say as absolutely right, I hope that I can instill the tools in them to understand relativism, correlation and situational problem solving as adults.

     Erikson believed that as we move into adulthood we seek intimacy rather than isolation.  He believes that we seek to make concrete affiliations with others, as children he believed we prefer isolation because we are vulnerable to criticism.  I didn’t really agree with this initially, but I thought about how we cling to our parents and family as children, never really wanting to stray far away from home.  When we get older we start to find friends who think the way that we do and people we are comfortable with.  I remembered how as I got older I started to want to be around people who validated the way that I felt about myself, people who supported me or even made me better.  You begin to trust people who aren’t your parents or initial support systems.

     More than any other chapter so far, I understood how physical development plays a part on psychological well being.  Chapter ten dealt with the loss of sensory abilities, effects of poor health habits and the visible signs of aging.  There is an artist who photographed himself every day for twenty-four years, in order to show the physical effects of aging.  He started at age thirty-one and ended at age fifty-five.  What I thought was profound was how slowly the man seemed to age for the first fifteen years, and then progressively his aging seemed rapid.  I wondered how well he took care of himself, was he fit or a drinker, and how those things affected his overall appearance.  I didn’t wonder about this because I was extremely interested in the aging of this particular artist, but I was extremely interested in how to take care of myself to slow this aging process.  The connections between our physical development and cognitive development is not only eye opening, it explains a lot about how we feel and what we experience at different times in our life.