Adulthood: Psychosocial Development

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Part VII
Chapter Twenty-Two

• Adulthood Psychosocial Development

Ages and Stages Intimacy Generativity
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Adulthood Psychosocial Development

• emotional reactions to events in adulthood are
  fluid
• marriage, parenthood, divorce, and the empty
  nest, each sometimes joyous and sometimes not,
  are ages and stages of adult development

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Ages and Stages

• The Social Clock
• refers to the idea that the stages of life, and
  the behaviors appropriate to them, are set by
  social standards rather than by biological
  maturation
• middle age begins when the culture believes it
  does, rather than at a particular age in all
  cultures

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Ages and Stages

• Culture
• the patterns of behavior that are passed from one
  generation to the next, groups have their own
  culturevalues, customs, clothes, dwellings,
  cuisine, assumptions--people are influenced by
  more than one culture
• Cohort
• people born within a few years of one
  another--these people are affected by the same
  values, events, technologies, culture
• Socioeconomic Status (SES)
• social class--more than money, occupation,
  education, place of residence--includes
  advantages and disadvantages

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Ages and Stages

• The Midlife Crisis
• a period of unusual anxiety, radical
  reexamination, and sudden transformation that is
  widely associated with middle age
• which actually has more to do with developmental
  history than with chronological age

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Ages and Stages

• Personality Throughout Adulthood
• personality is a major source of continuity
• provides coherence and identity
• allows people to know themselves and be known

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The Big Five Personality Traits

• remain quite stable throughout adulthood
• openness, conscientiousness, extroversion,
  agreeableness and neuroticism

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Ages and Stages

• Ecological Niche
• the particular lifestyle and social context
  adults settle into that are compatible with their
  individual personality needs and interests

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Ages and Stages

• Culture and Personality
• personality variations are more evident between
  one person and another in the same nation than
  between one nation and another

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Ages and Stages

• Gender Convergence
• a tendency for men and women to become more
  similar as they move through middle age

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Intimacy

• intimacy needs are lifelong
• adults meet their needs for social connection
  with relatives, friends, coworkers, and romantic
  partners
• Social Convoy
• collectively, the family members, friends,
  acquaintances, and even strangers who move
  through life with an individual

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Intimacy

• Friends
• typically the most supportive members of the
  social convoy, because they are chosen
• research study found that friendships tend to
  improve with age

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Intimacy

• Protection Against Stress
• allostatic load
• the total, combined burden, of stress and disease
  that an individual must cope with

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Intimacy

• Gender Differences
• linked lives
• the notion that family members tend to share all
  aspects of each others lives, from triumph to
  tragedy

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Intimacy

• Family Bonds
• household
• a group of people who live together in one
  dwelling and share its common spaces, such as
  kitchen and living room

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Intimacy

• A Developmental View
• familism
• the idea that family members should support one
  another because family unity is more important
  than individual freedom and success or failure

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Intimacy

• Adult Siblings
• fictive kin
• a term used to describe someone who becomes
  accepted as part of a family to whom he or she
  has no blood relationship

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Intimacy

• Marriage
• a public commitment to one long-term sexual
  partner
• adults seek committed sexual partnerships to help
  meet their needs for intimacy, to raise children,
  share resources, and provide care

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Intimacy

• Marriage and Happiness
• from a developmental perspective, marriage is
  useful
• adults thrive if another person is committed to
  caring for them married people are a littler
  happier, healthier and richer than unmarried
  people

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Intimacy

• Long-Term Marriage
• long-term quality of a marriage relationship is
  affected by family relationships in childhood
• empty nest
• a time in the lives of parents when their grown
  children leave the family home to pursue their
  own lives

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Intimacy

• Homosexual Partners
• everything that applies to heterosexual partners
  applies to homosexual partners who make a
  commitment to each other

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Intimacy

• Divorce
• marriages never ends in a vacuumthey are
  influenced by the social and political context
• Divorce Rates
• the power of the social context is evident in
  variations in divorce rates
• Over the Years, Divorce and Remarriage
• divorce is most likely to occur within the first
  five years
• for long-term marriages, divorce is less likely
  but more devastating when it happens

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Generativity

• Generativity versus Stagnation
• when adults seek to be productive in a caring
  way, usually through work or parenthood (Erikson)
• generativity comes with maturityage is not a
  necessary marker

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Generativity

• Caregiving
• Erikson wrote, a mature adult needs to be
  needed
• some caregiving is physical, but much is
  psychological
• kinkeeper
• the person who takes primary responsibility for
  celebrating family achievements, gathering the
  family together, and keeping in touch with family
  members who do not live nearby

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Generativity

• Caring for Children
• bearing and raising children is labor intensive
• the insistence on dramatizing the dependence of
  children on adults often blinds us to the
  dependence of the older generation on the young
  one

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Generativity

• Many paths to parenthood
• a parental alliance assumes two cooperating
  parents
• children can develop well in any family
• 1/3 of North American adults become stepparents,
  adoptive parents, or foster parents at some point
  in their lives
• the social construction about real parents is
  misleading

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Generativity

• sandwich generation
• a term for the generation of middle-aged people
  who are supposedly squeezed by the needs of the
  younger and older generations
• some adults do feel pressured by these
  obligations, but most are not burdened by them,
  either because they enjoy fulfilling them or
  because they choose to take on only some of them,
  or none

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Generativity

• Employment
• Extrinsic rewards of work
• the tangible rewards, usually in the form of
  compensation, that one receives for a job
• Intrinsic rewards of work
• the intangible benefits one receives from a job
  that come from within oneself

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Generativity

• Human Needs
• it is crucial to learn how new work conditions
  support developmentin the functions of family
  caregiving, personal creativity, satisfaction,
  and esteem and mentoring of other workers

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Generativity

• Diversity
• benefit of modern economy is increased diversity
• more employed women and minority groups
• higher employment rates have helped with those
  once shut out