Human Life Span Development Flashcards
What is the Human Life Span development approach?
Human Life Span development is a scientific approach to understanding human growth and change throughout life.
It encompasses physical, cognitive, social, and personality development of a person.
Different life stages make up different experiences and these have a definite impact on human behaviour.
The life-span perspective examines how a person grows, develops, and declines by taking multiple aspects and placing them in different frameworks for understanding.
It involves the study of constancy and change in behaviour throughout the life journey: (a) infancy and childhood (b) adolescence (c) young and middle adulthood and (d) late adulthood
What is the Social Construction in the Human Life Span development approach?
A Social Construction is a shared notion of reality and it is a function of society and culture at a given time.
Talk about the Life Stages from birth to childhood in Human Life Span Development Approach
Refer to LG page 58 & 59
Explain behaviour of adult
children in blended families (Blended Families during Young and Middle Adulthood)
A child’s reaction to a divorce depends on a variety of factors: (a) age and
gender of the child, (b) the length of time of severe discord in the marriage (c)
the length of time between the first separation and the formal divorce.
The way the parents handle the child’s concern, fears, questions and anxieties will
determine how traumatic the divorce will be to the child. Some children grow up thinking that they are the cause for the parents’ break-up and this lower their self-esteem and self-worth.
When one of the parents passed on, the way the adults help the child to accept the lost is crucial to determine how the child will adjust his life without the
deceased parent. Some children may grow blaming himself/herself for the death of the parent.
The way the child handles the divorce of the parents or the death of the parent will determine how they will behave in a blended family when the surviving parent remarries. This will affect their behaviour when they reach young and middle adulthood.
A blended family includes children from one or both of the parents’ previous
relationships. While parents may approach remarriage with great joy and
expectations, their children may not be nearly as excited. The children are more likely to feel uncertain about the upcoming changes and how it will affect their relationships with their natural parents. The ‘Step Family Structure’ is created and when families ‘blend’, it creates stepfamilies and things rarely progress smoothly because some children may resist changes, while parents become frustrated when the new family does not function like their previous family. The children will also be worried about living with their stepsiblings, whom they may not like. This is when some young adults leave home to be on their own by marrying young and the older adults will buy a place, married or
may move in to stay with friends if they have the means. Those who stay in
the family structure may isolate themselves from the rest of the new family
members.
If the blended families can work out their growing pains and live together
successfully, the adult children will be able to contribute to the well-being of the step family structure.
However, it can take a long time for a blended family
to begin to feel comfortable and function well together.
Explain the behaviour of adults over 65 years old (Ageing during Late Adulthood)
Ageing is final stage of life.
People experience ageing differently depending on their heredity genes,
lifestyle, and attitudes.
However, everyone must adjust to ageing gracefully.
Ageing is a process of adjusting to continual changes. It means changes to the physical, psychological, relationships, social, environment, situation, behaviour, spiritual, and intellectual ability of a person. This poses a challenge for the ageing adults and their care-givers to manage these changes well or to build ‘resilience’ to adjust to them.
What are changes in the events faced by the ageing adults, and the impact these have on their behaviour?
Refer to LG pages 63-65
