Читать книгу Lifespan Development - Tara L. Kuther - Страница 74

1 Consider the sociohistorical context in which you were raised. What historical and societal events may have influenced you? What events have shaped your generation’s childhood and adolescence?

2 Consider the societal and cultural events that your parents may have experienced in childhood and adolescence. What technology was available? What historical events did they experience? What were the popular fads of their youth? What influence do you think these sociohistorical factors may have had on your parents’ development?

A final element of the bioecological system is the chronosystem, which refers to how the bioecological system changes over time. As people grow and change, they take on and let go of various roles. For example, graduating from college, getting married, and becoming a parent involve changes in roles and shifts in microsystems. These shifts in contexts, called ecological transitions, occur throughout life.

Recently, the bioecological model has been criticized for its vague explanation of development, especially the role of culture (Vélez-Agosto, Soto-Crespo, Vizcarrondo-Oppenheimer, Vega-Molina, & García Coll, 2017). Situated in the macrosystem, culture is said to influence development through the interdependence of the systems. Yet current conceptualizations of culture view it as all the processes used by people as they make meaning or think through interactions with group members (Mistry et al., 2016; Yoshikawa, Mistry, & Wang, 2016). Critics therefore argue that since culture is manifested in our daily activities, it is inherent in each bioecological level (Vélez-Agosto et al., 2017). A second criticism arises from the sheer complexity of the bioecological model and its attention to patterns and dynamic interactions. We can never measure and account for all of the potential individual and contextual influences on development at once, making it difficult to devise research studies to test the validity of the model. Proponents, however, argue that it is not necessary to test all of the model’s components at once. Instead, smaller studies can examine each component over time (Jaeger, 2016; Tudge et al., 2016). In any case, bioecological theory remains an important contribution toward explaining developmental change across the lifespan and is a theory that we will consider throughout this book.

Shortly after birth, goslings imprint to their mothers, meaning that they bond to her and will follow her to ensure they will be fed and remain protected. Ethologists propose that animal and human caregiving behaviors have an evolutionary basis.

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