The authors of your text take a comprehensive look at Human Development, including physical growth, cognitive development, language, and looks at the impact of genetics, parental involvement, social demands and many other facets of life. From birth to old age and imminent death, we are constantly evolving, developing new feelings and attitudes, and aging.
The psychological implications of how we become who we are as individuals and the roles we assume, skills we acquire, language, behaviors, and other aspects of our lives are great, but we must navigate the course of development not all at once, but over time, which theorists have most often attempt to organize by developmental “stages”.
Though not covered to any degree in our text, Freud theorized that sex was a major motivator in his “psychosexual development” stages which have been controversial but interesting. This is not surprising given that Freud was intrigued by Charles Darwin’s theories that basically said “who has the most offspring and is highly adaptive will perpetuate evolution”. Reproduction was therefore the “gasoline” that ran the machines for perpetuating one’s genes.
More in tune with interpersonal relationships and development of the total person are the numerous theories in Chapter 9. The text nicely looks at the pros and cons of many theories of development from infancy through old age. One of the most intriguing is that of Erik Erikson, whose eight stages of development are fascinating and may resonate with you and many of your classmates.
I invite each of you to carefully review Erikson’s stages of development, and his notion that each stage has a significant hurdle (he calls them “crises”) that must be overcome or resolved so that the individual can move on to the next stage. Please tell me and your classmates how you feel about the issues associated with bridging the jump from childhood to early adolescence and its subsequent stages, moving last into the stages of adulthood. Pros and cons as well as personal challenges are welcome if you are comfortable sharing the latter.
book:Licht, D. M., Hull, M. G., & Ballantyne, C. (2017). Psychology (3rd edition). New York: Worth Publishers. ISBN-13:978-1-319-23715-8
