My Childhood Experience

For the majority of my life, I had been shy, even though it didn’t seem like it most of the time, I was scared to death when I met new people. I know that it sounds extremely trivial, but I feel that when you first meet someone, you’re ultimately giving them their first impression of yourself and that is a lot of pressure. It seemed almost certain that I would lead a life of being a social wallflower until March 2017, more specifically, March 28th, 2017. This day was and still is important to me because I learned how to be confident, and through my experience, it taught me something that I will hold onto forever. Prior to this day, I was an extremely introverted person and rarely went out of my way to make friends. As a volunteer at day

One of the most critical points in a person’s life is their childhood. Erik Erikson

Our childhood plays a significant role in defining the kind of person that we become and the type of life that we live.

This essay will demonstrate my understanding of developments which occur at each stage of an individual's life cycle. I will relate these developments to two relevant psychological theories and discuss how an individual's needs must be met to enable them to develop.

New needs and tensions will arise in each area of life initiating one to seek new ways of adapting to these new found stressors. In return this forces them to form different kinds of intimate relationships. This maturation helps forms one’s personality (Kowalski, & Westen, 2002). “Relationships formed during each stage of life serve as a prototype for interactions in later stages. For this reason, there exists a continuum of relationships formed throughout a lifetime that shape and mold specific personality traits. Sigmund Freud, Erik Erikson, Jean Piaget, and Lawrence Kohlberg, describe development as a series of stages. A stage is a period in development in which people exhibit typical behavior patterns and establish particular capacities” (Kowalski, & Westen, 2002). “The various stage theories share three assumptions: First people pass through stages in a specific order, with each stage building on capacities developed in the previous stage, second stages most related to one’s age, third development is discontinuous, with qualitatively different capacities emerging in each stage” (Kowalski, & Westen, 2002).

There have been many ideas on how to define childhood that have been expressed over the years, from more controversial concepts such as the psychosexual stages developed by Freud to the more polished concepts like Jean Piaget’s stages of cognitive development and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s tabula rasa. Despite these differing academic views about how to describe childhood, there is a universal understanding that childhood is a distinct space from adulthood. Childhood is often depicted as a stage in life that is filled with unruly behaviour, an abundance of imagination and irrational thought processes. It is also commonly portrayed as a vulnerable period in which children should be sheltered from neglect, abuse, and exploitation. As newcomers to

Erikson’s views on development made an addition to some aspects of Freud and deviated from some of his other emphases. Erikson proposed that we develop more “Psychosocially” than “Pyschosexually” (Freud’s framework), which crosses the entire life span. His view is deterministic in the sense that adults are effected by their childhood, but he is not reductionistic in suggesting that the entire mold of adult personality is formed only in the early years; rather there is ongoing development throughout life.

Man has a certain innocence at a young age which is however paired with a selfish trait that eventually changes throughout one’s life. Freud’s psychoanalytic personality

“The conscience of people is formed by the influences that surround them; their notions of good and evil are the result of the moral atmosphere they breathe. “ Jean Paul. A person's childhood is the beginning of their identity, who they believe they are, how they act, and their personality. The culture that humans have been encased in, is constantly changing and as a result, so do people and their identity. Who a person is and who they will become can be greatly influenced by the external factors that they are exposed to. People change us, but getting even deeper the friends we choose to surround ourselves with have an extensive effect on us. Someone’s childhood is the one of the earliest external factors they are exposed to.

Individual differences in self-identity and personality construction are modified by the social environment and genetic heritability (Scarr, 1992). The development of niche-picking allows children to self-select their own experience based on their genetic predisposition, and the process of constructing self is altered through different age stages and life events (Scarr, 1992). However, the novel demonstrates how self-identity and personality can be shaped through social experiences and uses classical psychoanalytic theory and theory of self-discrepancy to explain the development of the characters. First, Freud’s classical psychoanalytic theory offers an explanation to illustrate the development of personality theory. To elaborate, individual’s mental life can be described with the id, the ego, and the superego, which center around the importance of sexuality,

Both adults’ and children’s literatures are currently brimming with a wide array of books based off of the world renowned film franchise, Star Wars. The middle ground, young adult reads, however, is distinctly lacking this flavor of books. Star Wars: Lost Stars by Claudia Gray is the very first of its kind to break into the young adult literature scene. When one thinks of Star Wars, it is quite possible that you picture 40-some-year-old men reliving their childhoods by swinging lightsabers haphazardly at one another. However, this is not (entirely) the case in modern-day America. The next generation of Star Wars fans are emerging in the form of today’s children and teenagers. The emergence of advanced literature in the more familiar setting of the Star Wars universe is important for these students, as well as it being a potential gateway to helping students actively engage in (and enjoy) quality reading.

Years on, many researches and observations have been undertaken and new psychoanalytical theories started to reject Freud's and Erikson's staged view on child development and replaced it by introducing child emotional development in the context of development of self and attachment with significant others.

“Early life experiences impact the person across their lifespan” is conveyed in the Jane Piaget theory ‘Stages of cognitive development’ (1936) and Erik Erikson theory ‘Psychosocial stages’ (1950). Piaget argued that children develop knowledge by constructing their experience and observe with their own ideas about how the thing works.(Burton, L.J., Westen, d. & Kowalski, R.M. 2015) He developed 4 stages of his theory: Sensorimotor Stage, Preoperational Stage, Concrete Operational Stage and Formal Operational Stage. At the same time, Erik Erikson proposed a psychoanalytic theory of psychosocial development comprising eight stages from infancy to adulthood. At every stage, a person will encounter a psychological crisis, the development of

As a very small child I don’t remember too much, but the things that I do remember were seen through a child’s eyes that has made me the person that I am today and I will always have those memory’s with me until my last breath on this earth. In this essay I intend to show how my childhood and adult life to this point has influenced my life, my journey. By utilizing the adult development theories from this class I also intend on showing how they relate to my Life experiences and where I am today as an Adult student.

As a child, I remember growing up in an area of Atlanta, Georgia called Mechanicsville. This area was very diverse with people from various socioeconomic backgrounds. Often, my mother would share valuable life lessons with my siblings and me. One, in particular, I remember even to this day is, “Life is only as challenging or motivating as you make it”. Originally, I did not quite understand the purpose of this aphorism; but as I got older, the meaning became quite clear. Although life for me has been both wholesome and unhealthy, in hindsight, it seemed better than my childhood friends. If you knew the real story, you would see that my life is not as perfect as it appears. Just to provide you with a little insight into my world, I had a