Читать книгу Lifespan Development - Tara L. Kuther - Страница 45

This is a book about lifespan human development—the ways in which people grow, change, and stay the same throughout their lives, from conception to death. When people use the term development, they often mean the transformation from infant to adult. However, development does not end with adulthood. We continue to change in predictable ways throughout our lifetime, even into old age. Developmental scientists study human development seeking to understand these lifetime patterns of change.

Table 1.1 illustrates the many phases of life through which we progress from conception to death. The phases may have different labels and different sets of developmental tasks, but all have value. The changes that we undergo during infancy, for instance, influence how we experience later changes, such as those during adolescence and beyond. Each phase of life is important and accompanied by its own demands and opportunities.

Change is perhaps the most obvious indicator of development. For example, the muscle strength and coordination needed to play sports increases over childhood and adolescence, peaks in early adulthood, and begins to decline thereafter, declining more rapidly from middle to late adulthood. However, there also are ways in which we change little over our lifetimes. Some personality traits, for example, are highly stable over the lifespan, so that we remain largely the “same person” into old age (Schwaba & Bleidorn, 2018; Wortman, Lucas, & Donnellan, 2012).

Lifespan human development can be described by several principles. As discussed in the following sections, development is (1) multidimensional, (2) multidirectional, (3) plastic, (4) influenced by multiple contexts, and (5) multidisciplinary (Baltes, Lindenberger, & Staudinger, 2006; Overton & Molenaar, 2015).