The human body and mind goes through a number of various developmental stages that define the life from that point on. Adolescence is perhaps the most conspicuous of these stages, defined as the stage right between childhood and adulthood. The individual goes through a myriad of social, behavioral, physical and sexual changes.
He/she experiences a change of attitude, approach and visions In all aspects of life. This paper shall attempt to highlight the developmental changes humans experience and how a preteen learns to adapt to changes that are not under his control and even resistance proves fatal in the face of them. Human Development 3 Human Development: A Definition Human development refers to the aspects of development In the context of clinical or developmental psychology, or human development theory. However, it also deals with the behavioral changes that take place as a child grows up.
It includes problem solving abilities, conceptual understanding, acquisition of language, moral understanding, identity formation etc. Trends in Human Development Human development Is a field of study committed to understanding steadiness and change during the lifespan. It dates back to observational and Interview studies of children and adolescents in the early part of the twentieth century. In the beginning, description–charting age-related milestones, such as when a child first walked, spoke in sentences, formed a friendship, and reached puberty-?was the primary activity of developmentally (Feldman, 2010).
Little attention was given to process the how and why of human change. Longitudinal research has been an influential force in raising the field’s consciousness of diversity In development. Even though they have been few In numbers, longitudinal studies came about In the asses and asses. The most prominent began with a focus on child and adolescent development however, was extended over participants’ lifetimes (Feldman, 2010). Tracking of individual course of change showed unique routes to maturity and both stability and instability in physical health, intelligence, and social and personality functioning.
For example, researchers discovered that the majority of children show mints, and sometimes much more. Those most likely to succeed were predisposed to be independent and competitive in school and had parents who were highly interested in their intellectual activities and pushed them to succeed. While individuals who were not successful in life were likely to have parents who made little effort to motivate them and who showed extremes in child rearing, using either very severe or very loose discipline (McCall, 1973).
From the start, longitudinal work challenged Human Development 4 genetic determinism and showed complex biological and environmental intrusions to development (Friedman, et al. , 1995). It also provided part of the foundation for the modern emphasis on studying development all over the lifespan. The idea of human development makes as a social and biological population process more concrete. One can conceive of at least three levels of concepts that commonly are distinguished in developmental research: the epigenetic; the behavioral; and the institutional.
Sociologists typically focus on institutional levels; psychologists, on the behavioral; and biologists, on the epigenetic. Associated with each level are both tactic and process concepts. Institutional concepts refer to social structure and function at some moment in the “life” of a social system. The behavioral concerns of psychologists often differentiate into the manifest performances or behavioral functions and the underlying inherent capacities or structures.
At the epigenetic level, one might call attention to the vital potentials within and among cellular, molecular, and organ systems that define an organic condition for both capacities and performances. In addition to static concepts, there are ideas about processes at ACH level, processes that create the conditions for what behavioral scientists define as development; these processes are themselves interrelated. Beginning at the epigenetic level, processes of normal aging across the component of inherent reserve set biological conditions for the advancement of psychological capacities.
Similarly, at the institutional level, changes in social relations social change broadly construed set conditions for genetic processes at the phenotypes behavioral level that are expressed as either continuity or change in performances. In this framework, behavioral continuity and change are products of the interplay among the three levels, although in an ultimate causal sense not all levels may play an equally important role. The hypothesis of casual import that underlies my schema of human development is that both progression of capacities and continuity or change in behavior originates from patterns of social change and normal aging.
Put another way, the hypothesis put forward is that behaviors and capacities are potentially likely to change or develop and either do so or not as a function of changing potentials in genetics or changing parameters in the society. At any time, individuals Human Development 5 will develop along more versus less similar trajectories of qualitative and quantitative change according to the variability permitted by the social and biological changes.
For example, if an individual of same age and grade experiences a high degree of age-graded differentiation in developmental tasks that one is expected to master prior to adulthood, individuals sampled from the same age and grade would appear development might be described within a hypothetical social context of lesser age- graded school enrollment and curriculum. Individuals’ behaviors can affect theirs and others’ development. The mechanisms are several, and they differ in respect to the scope of time over which an effect is traced.
One can distinguish mechanisms of personal self regulation that alter one’s level of vital potential and either change the speed and/or direction of normal biological aging. Life-style expressions in the consumption of alcohol, tobacco, and fatty foods are examples of such self regulations that affect one’s physical and behavioral development through the process of biological aging (Cutler, 1981). Finally, social change itself can affect hysterical and behavioral development through its impact on normal aging, although again over a longer evolutionary span.
Forms of adaptation of institutions to changing physical settings and sociopolitical contexts can have selective implications for population survival. Since collective actions are the major basis of social change, then individual’s can influence their own development through social change and through changes in normal aging. The meta-theory of development is explicitly that of a biological and sociological population process working itself out in an evolutionary or historical time perspective. What one means by individual or psychological development (I. . , age-related or time-related changes in children versus changes in adults) and what developmental functions one can describe for a given birth companion are not naturally given constructs. They are evolutionary products in which the contingencies and constraints of population processes and life actions continue to play a prominent role. Human Development 6 Children develop postnatal to significant degrees because of the heretofore adaptive significance of human communities and cooperative social organization.
Plasticity as feature of developmental potential throughout the life span apparently follows from the same evolutionary history. Variability in developmental trajectories between children and adults and among both children and adults seems to reflect differential patterns of age-graded social institutions and their sequential alignment for substantial segments of each successive generation and birth cohort (Kohl’, 1982). Thus, individual development can neither be completely defined nor explained without reference to properties of collectivities and historical populations. Development Change Functions in Historical Populations
From insects to humans, general developmental progressions, such as physiological and behavioral rhythms, often are discovered to be driven by external or environmental conditions rather than internal factors. Among social animals, especially mans complex “culture” (Lumens & Wilson, 1981) and social organization, development takes on a more complicated construction as “experience” assumes a larger, more individually varied, more historically (temporally) variable role in development. Aging is a socio-historical variable to be explained by population processes at the biological and societal levels.
It proposes that human development is a special form of time-dependent process that can vary across people and across history. Because it can vary as a characteristic of historical populations, different age differential degrees of development. To the extent that social categories capture the fullness of individual variability, then these categories suggest important causal factors in developmental experience. And, developmental change can be greater or lesser in its variability across individuals, groups and in its differentiation from non-developmental change in one historical moment as contrasted with another.
In this conceptual framework, some people may change while others do not; some age categories may manifest developmental changes, but not necessarily all; adults may develop in some societies or in some epochs but not in others. These variations across Human Development 7 people, time, and change functions become explicable only in a population framework in which they are the dependent variables. Behavioral psychological or individual development is defined or described by internal individual change over time.
A developmental function is a prototypical or normative path of change, expressed as a function of time, for a specific population of individuals in which the vagaries of idiosyncratic situational factors (e. G. , illness) are sorted out in order to reveal the common diachronic pattern of intra-individual change. But precisely because the analyst is rarely able to determine before the fact which interpersonal, situational factors are common causes and which are “errors of measurement” or other extraneous individual conditions, developmental functions can only be discerned from a population of individuals.
Thus, the expectation of developmental change accounting for normative sequences of states and/or paths f quantitative fluctuation in time directs the analyst toward these factors that create developmental sequences rather than non-developmental change. Such explanations, by definition, lead to sociological and population biological causes rather than individualistic, person-centered ones. It is only when development is taken out of its historical context that it becomes a matter of individual development rather than one of a population process.
In a historical framework, development is a constant, or a mode around which individual variability is an explanation of intra- individual change. In view of meta-theoretical arguments that human development is best conceived as a transactional product or as an evolutionary outcome of autocratically systems’ properties in historical human populations, I. E. , self- organization Mattson, 1980), it seems desirable to redefine the empirical study of development.
The reorientation is simply to sample and record the time paths of behaviors or capacities of persons from a population and to analyze these life histories for evidence of statistical commonalities in time-related change. Operationally, developmental change is studied as an analysis of variation across population elements within some historical interval. What is identified empirically as developmental change is common variance in time-dependencies of some attributes of an element. Developmental change is explained by searching for those putatively causal factors that Human Development 8 underlie the commonality in time dependency.
In a population framework, individual development is not studied as intra-individual change and intra-individual differences in such changes; it is, via individuality commonalities in time- dependent change. Explanations of normative, age-graded changes lie at the manifestations create a rather uniform timetable for those who undergo them irrespective of their development at onset. It is the organization of such events and event sequences in terms of subpopulations defined by the age of the process chronological or social that constitutes the analytical agenda and constitutes the causal question for developmental research.
By definition, all change in an entity’s state occurs over some temporal interval and is a function of time. The longer the interval of observation, the more likely one is to observe a state-to-state transition, or an event. To distinguish development or aging from this generic yeoman of events from change in general one requires a further specification, and in my meta-theory the concept of duration dependence denotes that special kind of time-dependent change.
Duration dependence is a condition of the rate of change in a set of events for a social population or some biological or social subpopulation; Just as one can characterize the speed of an automobile from its acceleration or change in speed, so one can ask if the rate of change is stationary or not. When the rate of change in the population of interest is non-constant, or non- stationary, aging or development is occurring; when the rate is constant for all entities in the population, the observed change is not developmental change or If the rate of change is duration-dependent then individuals at some aging. Placement states are “developing” at different rates as a function of their “ages” or time spent in that state. By contrast, if the rate is stationary all elements of the population experience the same likelihood or pace of leaving the original state at any given moment without regard to their durations or waiting times in that state. System, or societal subpopulation, in which the rate of change is stationary, is not without change. For example, in a stationary population process which also is at equilibrium, one Human Development 9 can observe individual entities moving from state to state.
However, the distribution of individual cases across the state space remains the same, or in equilibrium, despite change at the individual level. In such an example, individual change is taking place in the absence of aging or development, which is a property of the collectivity of individuals in the subpopulation. The definition of developmental change as a function of the rate of change, namely instantiations or inconstant dates of change, has two important implications.
First, it allows a true life-span approach to the study of development. The definition is freed of any specific functional form of change, a longstanding problem in reconciling developmental research on adults with that on children. It permits the synthesis of life-span research on development with life-span research on aging by making aging and development synonymous with a process whose dynamic depends on an individual Second, the definition explicitly calls for a comparative method of ages-in-state. Analysis within a population framework.
The characteristic of stationary or instantiations in the rate of change cannot be determined from the analysis of a single entity or individual. Indeed, as mentioned in the preceding paragraph, an individual can manifest change over time, even though his or her likelihood of experiencing some event at a given instant is neither greater nor lesser than another person that is, not tied to their relative ages. Age-graded Transitions change. Age-graded transitions from state to state are the most obvious and familiar instances.
Consider the individual as potentially being in one and only one state at NY instant. If in a population of such persons their respective likelihoods of leaving one psychological or behavioral state for another are a function of their birth ages, the event of transition is age-graded. Age-graded events are characterized by common, or statistically normative, ages. The classical case of child development readily comes to mind, in which age-graded events (marked since the time of birth) are prototypically qualitative, quantitative, hierarchically unidirectional, and normative.
Human Development 10 The age grades consist of states or state clusters, sets of capacities and/or reference functions that differentiate grades from each other. Because time of onset does not vary (by definition) across persons, what is problematic in the study of age-grade transitions is the composition of states that constitute a grade and the path or sequence of grades. The mechanisms that initiate, maintain, and alter age- graded transitions are subjects for one kind of causal analysis of development within a population framework.
Event Transitions Age-graded institutions involve duration dependence in the rates of change measured since time of birth. They imply a set of states which have relatively moon profiles of age-incumbency attached to them for a given society or subpopulation. But not all duration-dependent changes, not all development or aging, is confined to events that are experienced as a function of time since birth. Event transitions are those where exposure to the risk of change starts with some nonage-graded event.
The onset of a virus, wounds from an accident, a spell of unemployment usually are not age-graded (although historically they may or may not tend to be so in the population). Still, the temporal courses of the flu, the healing of a wound, and the search for a Job typically are duration dependent. To the extent that they and other durations within a state are instantiations, such states and the events that define their onset contain important developmental information.
Recognizing that such event transitions may have developmental consequences but yet lack an age-specific chronological onset should give one pause in thinking about adult development. Many develop mentalists now describe the adult years as composed of fewer age-graded transitions and more non-normative ones. The implication is either that adults do not develop, because the change trajectories of adults become highly tremendous, or that they fail to manifest change functions that parallel those of children.
Yet neither of these conclusions need be valid insofar as the “non- normative” events of adulthood have a normative time-dependent course among those undergoing these transitions. Human Development 11 The distinction is crucial and illustrates the difference between event transitions and age-graded transitions. Neither is fundamentally or inherently more developmental than the other; neither may entail more interpersonal change over a given unit of time or greater individualized differences in those changes among those exposed to the risks of such change.
Conclusion understanding of human development. Its central argument that development and aging are life-long processes of historical populations is related to a variety of contextual, ecological theories that encompass multiple and two-way influences between societal change and individual change over the life span. Its independent contribution is through a synthesis of a population view of developmental change with a methodological approach to the study of development through dynamic models.
It takes the strong stand that development is but one form of time- elated change which is transformed into duration-dependent change through evolutionary processes linking population biology with social processes. In this framework, developmental or aging patterns by age or grade can only be explained against the background: (1) of non developmental change; and (2) of the formation of age-related behavioral functions under the influence of cohort-forming events and age-graded transitions in societies over historical time.
