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Critically Evaluate How Environmental Factors Impact on the Experiences and Life Events of an Adult Who You Know, and How These Factors Influence That Person’s Health, Wellbeing and Use of Support from Others

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Critically evaluate how environmental factors impact on the experiences and life events of an adult who you know, and how these factors influence that person’s health, wellbeing and use of support from others.

I am going to discuss an eighty two year old woman who I am going to call Mrs Smith (her name has been changed to protect her identity). Mrs Smith is the middle of five children, who has lived all her live in the South of England. She married at nineteen and had four children, all of whom are now grown up, happily married and with children of their own, giving her ten grandchildren and three great-grandchildren. Mrs Smith’s husband died in 1998 and she has lived on her own ever since. In this essay I am will be drawing on five …show more content…

Especially as they grow older and increasingly dependant on others. In order to assess how family relationships affect Mrs Smith, it is important to look at her family background. As a child growing up during World War II, Mrs Smith’s father was away in the navy for most of her formative years (from age 9 to 15) and her mother was the sole carer for her and her siblings. In 1940 Mrs Smith and her siblings were evacuated from their home on the south coast and sent to live with an aunt in a small village outside Bristol. The children had had little contact with their aunt before going to live with her so she was practically a stranger to them and this arrangement, which they were powerless to prevent, had the effect of enforcing their resilience and making them all quite independent characters. Mrs Smith says she remembers returning home after the war and finding it difficult to rebuild relationships with her parents as this would mean giving up her independence. Mrs Smith was married at nineteen and had her first child within a year of her marriage. As she was a housewife she was the main carer for her children and was, according to her eldest daughter, quite a dominant character. As she has grown older, Mrs Smith has found it very difficult to relinquish her dominant role, even though her children are now parents themselves and this has caused some conflict within the family, with

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