Developmental Task from Infancy to Late Maturity

1. Infancy and Childhood (0-5) 1) Learning to walk: Once the basic skills are mastered, he learns during later years to run, jump, and skip. 2) Learning to take solid foods: The way the child is treated during the weaning period, the schedule on which he is fed, and the age and suddenness of weaning, all have profound effects upon his personality. 3) Learning to talk: Between ages of twelve and eighteen months, the great moment of speech arrives. The two theories agree to this extent, namely (1) that the human infant develops a repertory of speech - sounds without having to learn them, and (2) that the people around him teach him to attach certain meanings to these sounds. 4) Learning to control the elimination of body waste: To learn to urinate and defecate at socially acceptable times and places. Toilet training is the first moral training that the child receives. The stamp of this first moral training probably persists in the child's later character. 5) Learning sex differences and sexual modesty: The kinds of sexual behavior he learns and the attitudes and feelings he develops about sex in these early years probably have an abiding effect upon his sexuality throughout his life. 6) Achieving physiological stability: It takes as many as five years for the child's body to settle down to something like the physiological stability of the child. 7) Forming simple concepts of social and physical reality: And, when his nervous system is ready, he must have the experience and the teachers to enable him to form a stock of concepts and learn the names for them. On this basis his later mental development is built. 8) Learning to relate oneself emotionally to parents, siblings, and other people: The way he achieves this task of relating himself emotionally to other people will have a large part in determining whether he will be friendly or cold, outgoing or introversive, in his social relations in later life. 9) Learning to distinguish right and wrong and developing a conscience: During the later years of early childhood he takes into himself the warning and punishing voices of his parents, in ways that depend upon their peculiar displays of affection and punishment toward him. Thus he develops the bases of his conscience, upon which a later structure of values and moral character will be built. 2. Childhood (6-12) 1) Learning to physical skills necessary for ordinary games: To learn the physical skills that are necessary for the games and physical activities that are highly valued in childhood--such skills as throwing and catching, kicking, tumbling, swimming, and handling simple tools. 2) Building wholesome attitudes towards oneself as a growing organism: To develop habits of care of the body, of cleanliness and safety, consistent with a wholesome, realistic attitude which includes a sense of physical normality and adequacy, the ability to enjoy using the body, and a wholesome attitude toward sex. Sex education should be a matter of agreement between school and parents, with the school doing what the parents feel they cannot do so well. The facts about animal and human reproduction should be taught before puberty. 3) Learning to get along with age-mates: To learn the give-and-take of social life among peers. To learn to make friends and to get along with enemies. To develop a "social personality."

4) Learning an appropriate masculine or feminine social role: To learn to be a boy or a girl--to act the role that is expected and rewarded. The sex role is taught so vigorously by so many agencies that the school probably has little more than a remedial function, which is to assist boys and girls who are having difficulty with the task. 5) Developing fundamental skills reading, writing, and calculating: To learn to read, write, and calculate well enough to get along in society. 6) Developing concepts necessary for everyday living: A concept is an idea which stands for a large number of particular sense perceptions, or which stands for a number of ideas of lesser degrees of abstraction. The task is to acquire a store of concepts sufficient for thinking effectively about ordinary occupational, civic, and social matters. 7) Developing conscience, morality, and a scale of values: To develop an inner moral control, respect for moral rules, and the beginning of a rational scale of values. Morality, or respect for rules of behavior, is imposed on the child first by the parents. Later, according to Piaget, the child learns that rules are necessary and useful to the conduct of any social enterprise, from games to government, and thus learns a "morality of cooperation or agreement" which is a true moral autonomy and necessary in a modern democratic society. 8) Achieving personal independence: To become an autonomous person, able to make plans and to act in the present and immediate future independently of one's parents and other adults. The young child has become physically independent of his parents but remains emotionally dependent on them. 9) Developing attitudes toward social groups and institutions: To develop social attitudes that are basically democratic. Attitudes, or emotionalized dispositions to act, are learned mainly in three ways; (1) by imitation of people with prestige in the eyes of the learner; (2) by collection and combination of pleasant or unpleasant experiences associated with a given object or situation; (3) by a single deeply emotional experience--pleasant or unpleasant--associated with a given object or situation. 3. Adolescent (13-18) 1) Achieving new and more mature relations with age-mates of both sexes: The goal: to learn to look upon girls as women and boys as men; to become an adult among adults; to learn to work with others for a common purpose, disregarding personal feelings; to learn to lead without dominating. 2) Achieving a masculine or feminine social role: To accept and to learn a socially approved adult masculine or feminine social role. 3) Accepting one's physique and using the body effectively: The goal: to become proud, or at least tolerant, of one's body; to use and protect one's body effectively and with personal satisfaction. 4) Achieving emotional independence of parents and other adults: The goal: to become free from childish dependence on parents; to develop affection for parents without dependence upon them. 5) Achieving assurance of economic independence: The goal: to feel able to make a living, if necessary. This is primarily a task for boys, in our society, but it is of increasing importance to girls. 6) Selecting and preparing for an occupation: The goal: to choose an occupation for which one has the necessary ability; to prepare for this occupation.

7) Preparing for marriage and family life: The goal: to develop a positive attitude toward family life and having children; and (mainly for girls) to get the knowledge necessary for home management and child rearing. 8) Developing intellectual skills and concepts necessary for civic competence: The goal: to develop concepts law, government, economics, politics, geography, human nature, and social institutions which fit the modern world; to develop language skills and reasoning ability necessary for dealing effectively with the problems of a modern democracy. Individual differences in mental development show themselves principally as differences in: (a) acquiring language and meanings, (2) acquiring concepts, (3) interests and motivation. 9) Desiring and achieving socially responsible behavior: The goal: to participate as a responsible adult in the life of the community, region, and nation; to take account of the values of society in one's personal behavior. 10) Acquiring a set of values and an ethical system as a guide behavior: The goal: to form a set of values that are possible of realization; to develop a conscious purpose of realizing these values; to define man's place in the physical world and in relation to other human beings; to keep one's world picture and one's values in harmony with each other. Definition: a value is an object or state of affairs which is desired. 4. Early Adulthood (19-30) This simple age-grading stops in our culture somewhere around sixteen to twenty. It is like reaching the end of the ladder and stepping off onto a new, strange cloud-land with giants and which to be circumvented and the goose that lays the golden eggs to be captured if only one can discover the know-how. 1) Selecting a mate: Until it is accomplished, the task of finding a marriage partner is at once the most interesting and the most disturbing of the tasks of early adulthood. 2) Learning to live with a marriage partner: After the wedding there comes a period of learning how to fit two lives together. In the main this consists of learning to express and control one's feeling--anger, joy, and disgust, live --so that one can live intimately and happily with one's spouse. 3) Starting a family: To have a first child successfully. 4) Rearing children: With the gaining of children the young couples take over a responsibility far greater than any responsibility they have ever had before. Now they are responsible for human life that is not their own. To meet this responsibility they must learn to meet the physical and emotional needs of young children. This means learning how to manage the child, and also learning to adapt their own daily and weekly schedules to the needs of growing children. 5) Managing a home: Family life is built around a physical center, the home, and depends for its success greatly upon how well-managed this home is. Good home management is only partly a matter of keeping the house clean, the furniture and plumbing and lighting fixtures in repair, having meals well-cooked, and the like. 6) Getting started in an occupation: This task takes an enormous amount of the young man's time and energy during young adulthood. Often he becomes so engrossed in this particular task that he neglects others. He may put off finding a wife altogether too long for his own happiness. 7) Taking on civic responsibility: To assume responsibility for the welfare of a group outside of the family--a neighborhood or community group or church or lodge or political organization.

8) Finding a congenial social group: Marriage often involves the breaking of social ties for one or both young people, and the forming of new friendships. Either the man or the woman is apt to move away from former friends. In any case, whether old friendships are interrupted by distance or not, the young couple faces something of a new task in forming a leisure-time pattern and finding others to share it with. The young man loses interest in some of his former bachelor activities, and his wife drops out of some of her purely feminine associations. 5. Middle Age (30-60) In the middle years, from about thirty to about fifty-five, men and women reach the peak of their influence upon society, and at the same time the society makes its maximum demands upon them for social and civic responsibility. It is the period of life to which they have looked forward during their adolescence and early adulthood. And the time passes so quickly during these full and active middle years that most people arrive at the end of middle age and the beginning of later maturity with surprise and a sense of having finished the journey while they were still preparing to commence it. The biological changes of ageing, which commence unseen and unfelt during the twenties, make themselves known during the middle years. Especially for the woman, the latter years of middle age are full of profound physiologically-based psychological change. The developmental tasks of the middle years arise from changes within the organism, from environmental pressure, and above all from demands or obligations laid upon the individual by his own values and aspirations. Since most middle-aged people are members of families, with teen-age children, it is useful to look at the tasks of husband, wife, and children as these people live and grow in relation to one another. Each family member has several functions or roles. The Man of the Family a man a husband a father a provider a homemaker The Woman of the Family a woman a wife a mother a homemaker family manager The Teen-Ager a person a family member

Unless the man performs well as a provider, it will be difficult for the woman to perform well as a homemaker. Unless the woman performs well as a mother, it will be difficult for the teen-age child to meet the tasks of adolescence. The developmental tasks of family members then, are reciprocal; they react upon one another. 1) Achieving adult civic and social responsibility 2) establishing and maintaining an economic standard of living 3) assisting teen-age children to become responsible and happy adults 4) Developing adult leisure-time activities 5) Relating oneself to one's spouse as a person 6) Accepting and adjusting to the physiological changes of middle age 7) Adjusting to ageing parents

6. Later Maturity (60- ) The fact that man learns his way through life is made radically clear by consideration of the learning tasks of older people. They still have new experiences ahead of them, and new situations to meet. At age sixty-five when a man often retires from his occupation, his changes are better than even of living another ten years. During this time the man or his wife very likely will experience several of the following things: decreased income, moving to a smaller house, loss of spouse by death, a crippling illness or accident, a turn in the business cycle with a consequent change of the cost of living. After any of these events the situation may be so changed that the old person must learn new ways of living. The developmental tasks of later maturity differ in only one fundamental respect from those of other ages. They involve more of a defensive strategy--of holding on the life rather than of seizing more of it. In the physical, mental and economic spheres the limitations become especially evident; the older person must work hard to hold onto what he already has. In the social sphere there is a fair chance of offsetting the narrowing of certain social contacts and interests by the broadening of others. In the spiritual sphere there is perhaps no necessary shrinking of the boundaries, and perhaps there is even a widening of them. 1) Adjusting to decreasing physical strength and health 2) Adjusting to retirement and reduced income 3) adjusting to death of spouse 4) Establishing an explicit affiliation with one's age group 5) Meeting social and civic obligations 6) Establishing satisfactory physical living arrangements: The principal values that older people look for in housing, according to studies of this matter, are: (1) quiet, (2) privacy, (3) independence of action, (4) nearness to relatives and friends, (5) residence among own cultural group, (6) cheapness, (7) closeness to transportation lines and communal institutions --libraries, shops, movies, churches, etc.

References: http://nongae.gsnu.ac.kr/~bkkim/won/won_117.html