Development Psychology: Interviewe with Caucasian American - Assignment Example

?Developmental Psychology: Project 2 Report The person I interviewed was a Caucasian American man Andrew Green, a 64 year old man living alone. Greenis a Civil Engineer by profession and is currently rendering the services of a General Manager at a construction project. Green married twice in his life; the first wife died two years after marriage leaving Green a daughter whereas his second wife divorced him five years after the marriage. Green has had a son and a daughter from his second wife both of whom are married and live abroad. The son from Green’s first wife is also married and lives separately with his family. Green cohabits with a 28 years old African American woman named Mary who is single and works as a nurse at a private hospital. Green enjoys a high socio-economic status. During his life, he has successfully accomplished many mega projects, but his private life has been traumatic. Right from his very early childhood, Green has been through many traumatic experiences, the first being the divorce between his parents when he was only one year old. Green has no sibling. Green takes responsibility for the breakage of his marriage saying that he lacked trust in his wife. In fact, Green has not had many good friends in life because of the same reason that he couldn’t trust anyone. Green says lack of trust is the very reason he has chosen to cohabit Mary rather than marrying her because he is afraid he might lose his confidence in her after they get married. The numerous sad experiences of his life has made Green a patient of depression. Green says that he has suffered from depression particularly for the last ten years. He has tried a number of ways to get rid of depression, but all of them have proved to be temporary solutions to his problem. Now Green is considering seeing a psychiatrist to help him come out of depression. Among the various methods he has tried to feel good, the one that proved relatively effective was substance abuse. Green says he has been on drugs for the last eight years. He has tried marijuana, cocaine, and alcohol. Frequent and consistent consumption of the drugs and alcohol caused great damage to his lever for which he has had a surgery some time ago. Since then, he has stopped consuming drugs but cannot help consuming alcohol. Green says he has moderate religious and political beliefs. His parents were Catholic Christians but did not instill strong moral values in him. A major cause of that was that Green happened to spend very little, if any time with his parents. Green revealed that his mother parted ways with his father when he was hardly 1 year old. During the first year of his life, Green’s father and mother both took good care of him. His parents lived in the joint family system. There were Green’s paternal grandparents, uncles and aunts, cousins, father and mother. After his parents divorced, Green was taken by his mother to her parents. As Green’s mother was a working woman, she could not find sufficient time to look after him, so most of Green’s day passed with his maternal parents from the age of 1 year onwards. In the night, Green’s mother would look after him, and days passed by the same way. After his parents’ divorce, Green saw his father for the first time when he was about two and a half years old, and kept seeing him in the court once every month from that time onwards. Green hardly recognized him, and felt of his father like a stranger. The gifts his father brought Green would put Green in discomfort. He couldn’t understand why a stranger brought him gifts once a month. It was not until he reached his early teenage when he happened to realize that it was his father who kept bringing him gifts every month. His mother got married when Green was in kindergarten school and did not come to see him very often after that. Although his father kept seeing him consistently once a month till he died when Green was 20 years old, yet he also did not want to keep Green with him since he feared it would affect his married life. Green says he doesn’t understand relations since he didn’t get a chance to live with his parents, and his own children also left him and are busy with their lives. Although he is a son, he says he doesn’t know what it feels to be like a son. Likewise, despite being a father, Green doesn’t know what fatherhood means. He is only good at cultivating relationships at temporal basis which is what he is currently doing with Mary. Jean Piaget proposed a theory of stages of cognitive development in which he asserted that every child passes through four stages of mental development. These stages explain how knowledge is obtained by the children and how they comprehend the nature of intelligence. Erik Erikson is another theorist who proposed eight stages of development and explained what behaviors lead to success and failures in each of the eight stages, and what implications can the success or failure have on an individual’s life. Green’s lack of trust in the old age can be attributed to certain events that happened in his very early childhood. The stage of childhood that has influenced Green’s adult life is the “stage of infancy” that starts at birth and lasts at the age of 18 months as defined by Erik Erikson. “Divorcing spouses who cannot peaceably make decisions about their children’s welfare and negotiate issues related to the children, put those children at increased risk for problems” (Matthews, n.d.). Since Green’s caregivers frequently changed during the stage of infancy, he could not develop trust for people. “The research on the relationship between father absence and the general level of the child's adjustment reveals that the loss of a father for any reason is associated with poor adjustment, but that absence because of separation, divorce, or desertion may have especially adverse effects” (Lynn cited in Demo and Acock, 1988). In light of Piaget’s theory of development, the childhood stage that has affected Green’s behavior in the adult like is the “sensorimotor stage” that lasts from birth till the age of 2 years. In this stage, the child comprehends the world with the help of sensations and movements. Presently, Green is in the stage of “maturity to death” which is the last of the eight stages of development defined by Erik Erikson. According to Erik Erikson, this is the stage when people tend to reflect on their lives. If the reflection lends them a sense of fulfillment, they feel wise. Failure to obtain the sense of fulfillment through reflecting upon the life leads to the feelings of regret, despair, and bitterness. In view of Piaget’s stages of development, Green is in the “formal operational stage”. Although Piaget’s stages of development are usually applied on children, yet the age range defined by Piaget for the formal operational stage is from 12 years onwards, including the age of Green. In the formal operational stage, an individual uses deductive reasoning and think about the ethical, philosophical, moral, and social problems that need abstract reasoning. Green’s reflections on his life experiences emphasize on the importance of good upbringing and parental attention toward the child for the child to grow up into a confident adult who understands relationships and is able to cultivate them. Every important relation in his life saw a sorrowful end, be it the relation of a father and a son, a mother and a son, or a husband and a wife. Had Green’s parents paid due attention toward him in the childhood, Green’s life would probably have been much better than what it is today. References: Demo, D. H., and Acock, A. C. (1988). The Impact of Divorce on Children. Journal of Marriage and the Family. 50: 619-648. Matthews, W. (n.d.). Long-term Effects of Divorce on Children. North Carolina Cooperative Extension Service. Retrieved from http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/depts/fcs/pdfs/fcs482.pdf. Read More