Adult Development essays

Adult Development essays When people talk about psychological development, what most people think of are children, who have clear and obvious developmental points. A child's development corresponds to his or her physical growth. Thus we can look at an infant and not expect the child to be able to walk a balance beam or ride a bike. We can look at a four year old and know that most four year olds will not yet know how to read. We can look at ten year old and state with confidence that this child is not yet ready to learn to ride a car. When thinking about development in this way, it is easy to conceptualize development as essentially over by age 18, allowing for some sort of transition to the one final state called "adulthood." However, adulthood has stages just as childhood does, and the recognition of this fact can help adults as they face new challenges and learn new skills. Adults have to face the establishment of their lives as independent of their parents, building their own careers, marriage and family, the loss of loved ones, increasing likelihood of some kind of chronic illness or infirmity, retirement, and old age. Just as a child may encounter difficulties as he or she progresses toward adulthood, adults may encounter difficulties as they face each new stage in adult life. According to Lucas and Kuhner (1999), development is the process of creating meaning out of the events we experience. The meanings we develop are influenced and restricted by how we perceive those events, and so is subjective. Our perceptions will not exactly match those of others and we may perceive similar events in markedly different ways depending on a number of variables including our individual traits, our prior experiences, and how we perceived and interpreted those events. Thus over time, each person develops his or her own individual lens (Lucas and Kuhner, 1999) through which subsequent events wi...