Life Span Perspective Paper


Life Span Perspective Paper
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Introduction
Life span perspective of development is meant to examine and explore the growth of an individual in terms of initial growth, development, and decline. It does this by taking various aspects and placing them in different frameworks to facilitate much understanding. It can also be argued that life span perspective of development provides vital information regarding the development of individuals through their lifespan. Such information includes how individuals came to be who they are today, who they are, and who they will become in the future.
Psychoanalytic theories are used to offer insight into the life span related issues and help to explain the stages that individuals are likely to pass through during their lifetime. The life span perspective of development is also vital in availing information regarding how the effects of the environment and hereditary may interact to bring out individual differences in life span development.
Life span perspective of development
The study of human development in an organized properly, life span perspective is essential since it does not just revolve around the development that occurs in childhood or adulthood but in every phases of life (Berger, 2011). It can be analyzed that the life span perspective is a view of people's development that features multicultural, multi-contextual, multidisciplinary, plastic, and multidirectional characteristics. Development can be said to be multicultural; therefore, the various contexts, such as family patterns, economic constraints, and historical conditions embed the lives of individuals (Berger, 2011). Development can also be viewed from a multicultural point of view where various cultures tend to affect the development of individuals. Barger (2011) goes ahead to explain that development is multidisciplinary in the sense that psychology and other subjects such as education, biology, anthropology, economics, genetics, history, and medicine among others provide the required insight into development.
Theories of life span development
There are various theories and ideologies that are geared towards explaining the concepts relating to life span development. Two of these theories are that advanced by an Austrian psychoanalyst known as Sigmund Freud and that of American development theorist by the name of Erik Erickson. The similarity exhibited by both theories is that the development and its attributes normally occur in stages.
Sigmund Freud’s psychosexual theory concentrates on the sexual drives of humans. He holds that development in humans occurs in stages where the first six years of development occurs in three successive stages that are highly characterized...