Description of Life Stages - Essay Example

"Description of Life Stages" is a perfect example of a paper on wellness and lifestyle.
There exist eight stages of life and each stage is different from the others in terms of psychological and behavioral patterns associated with that stage.

Infancy

At this stage, a child starts learning different behaviors, sounds, and words. This stage lasts until the age of 2 years. This stage is the earliest stage of life in which a child develops a sense of attachment with the parents and siblings.

Anal-Muscular Stage

The second stage is the anal-muscular stage in which a child starts developing self-confidence and self-control. This stage lasts until the age of 4 years. At this stage, a child starts exploring different things while achieving a degree of autonomy.

Genital-Locomotor Stage

This stage lasts until the age of 5 or 6 years. At this stage of life, a child starts enjoying instinctual gratifications and starts differentiating between the genders. The desire to explore different things becomes stronger at this stage.

Latency

Latency is the stage, which lasts until the age of 12 years. At this stage of life, a child learns to differentiate between good and bad following the teachings of parents and teachers and starts learning the social skills that are required to live in a society.

Adolescence

This is the most critical stage in the life of a person, which lasts until the age of 20 years. At this stage, a person develops himself/herself properly. The desire to explore sex and different aspects of life and the desire to achieve something in the future development at this stage. At this stage, a significant task for a person is to set up a proper philosophy of life (Harder, n.d.).

Young Adulthood

Young adulthood lasts until the age of 30 years. At this stage, a person wants to achieve some level of intimacy by developing different relationships with different people. A person, who develops himself/herself positively at this stage, never fails in the later stages of life.

Middle Adulthood

Middle adulthood lasts until the age of 55 to 60 years. At this stage, a person is complete concerning personal, professional, and social development. The concern towards the next generation goes to its peak at this stage of life.

Late Adulthood

This is usually the last stage of life, which begins from the age of 60 years and continues until death. At this stage, a person is done with everything in life. A bundle of experiences, a developed status in the society, and ego and integrity are the main aspects of this stage of life.

Influence of Age on Healthcare

From a patient’s perspective, age has a lot of influence on the heath of a person. The life stages of young adulthood, middle adulthood, and late adulthood hold significant importance to the health of a person because, in these stages, the decline in the major organs of the human body occurs. At the stage of young adulthood, the decline starts and moves on to its peak in late adulthood. Patients know that the decline is due to their growing age and that is why they do effective measures to escape from health-related problems.

Some patients believe that they can do nothing with the diseases and decline in the body organs because they think it as a matter of age. Whereas some patients go for treatments and prevention measures because they believe that they can deal with the diseases although it is a matter of growing age. The influence of age on the health of a person is very critical and one needs to take effective measures regarding healthcare to escape from the effects of aging.