This document contains summaries of different topics related to life-span development including:
1) A description of Kaydence Darling's strabismus condition and its heredity.
2) Issues with popularity in school and how it can negatively impact education and social relationships.
3) A mother's difficult experience answering questions after the death of her child and discussing the five stages of grief.
- Strabismus = inability of one eye to attain binocular vision with the other because of imbalance of the muscles of the eyeball ( Merriam-Webster, 2010). Strabismus also creates the eye to go weak and the eye does not have proper sight. Heredity Condition = The father has visual conditions and Strabismus is also in the family as well. Strabismus can be passed down from generation to generation. Treatment of condition = The treatment for Strabismus is to wear a patch over the strong eye so the weak eye can gain it’s strength and try to allign it’s self with the stronger eye. The weak also gains it’s strength in vision as well.
Popularity is something that plagues schools everywhere. It separates children through wealth, culture, abilities, and intelligence. It can cast people out, which causes early depression in adolescence, which ultimately can lead to individuals harming themselves or suicide. Popularity is an issue at school that should be put to rest. The children should be put to working together more and being more social in a way that makes everyone have a healthy relationship with their peers.
Children try their hardest to fit in at school because they want to be well liked, have lots of friends, and fit in with what they consider the ‘cool’ crowd. We all know that you can’t be loved by everyone. This is something purely psychological in the process of life-span development. The want for attention and love is also a part of personality development that occurs during the change in status from child to adolescent. Personality curbs around environment, family influence, and the media. Kids naturally want to be what they see. Like the popular catch phrase, ‘Monkey see, Monkey do.’ Popularity is a major issue at school because those children that focus on their education are often called ‘nerds’ and cast out in social gatherings. It can create feelings of doubt that there is something wrong with a child who is not deemed ‘cool’ and also cause depression.
Race, gender, or culture plays an important part in popularity and the desire to be paid attention to and liked. These issues spring up early in a child’s life because they have the desire to fit in and be like those around them. As in Erikson’s stages of development, children need to develop trust, have affection, and grow intellectually in order to develop successfully. Many children are afraid to be themselves because others might judge or not like to do the same things as they indulge in. The interviewee stated that education is more important now-a-days, and that those children coming fresh from junior high have no idea about the volume of social networking at high school, so being cool is important to them. Being popular is also different through race and style. Some individuals may group together that like a certain type of music or life style and be joined by others who like the same thing. They are popular in their own little school social world.
Karan Freeman went into shock on June 16, 2009 when her oldest son, Matthew Freeman, 26, died suddenly of a brain tumor. Karan was very close to her son, and they communicated daily. Karan could not imagine what life would be like for her without her son to share it. She described her first few hours after his death as, “having an out of body experience, not really happening, impossible, horrified because I didn’t get to tell him how much I loved and appreciated him as my son, I didn’t get to say goodbye”. Karan’s first response to her sons death was of denial, and then she isolated herself from as many people as possible. This is the first stage of the grieving process. Karan did not want people to be helpful, and she wanted to be alone. How a person progresses through the grieving process depends highly on the relationship before death. According to Feldman (2007), “people whose relationships were marked by ambivalence before death are more apt to suffer poor post-death outcomes than those who were secure in their relationships.” (P. 678) Karan states that she understands we are born to die, but our children should never die before us, and children should live a long life.
According to Santrock, “Kübler-Ross proposed five stages: denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance”, that occur after the death of a loved one. (2007, p. 667) Karan’s first response to her sons death was of denial, and she isolated herself from as many people as possible. This is the first stage of the grieving process. Karan did not want people to be helpful, and she wanted to be alone. Karan began to progress towards stage two of the grieving process, Anger. She is still at this stage today, after 11 months. Karan has added depression, stage four, to her stages of grieving. Some people suffer a single episode of depression that leads to Major Depression Disorder, “symptoms have been present during the same two week period and represent a change from previous functioning; at least one of the symptoms is either (1) depressed mood or (2) loss of interest or pleasure” (DSM-IV, 2000, pg. 356) Karan Freeman was a happy person until she lost her son. The event of her son’s sudden death triggered a deep depression in her. Dreams of her sons years growing into a man, a husband, a father, have been haunting her. She deals with her loss and her depression by denying that he has died. Everyone who experiences the death of a child goes through the five stages differently. Some people do not experience all five stages, and some become stuck in one stage, especially denial and anger. Many people take a very long time to progress through the stages until they are living a functional life again.