Adult Development

During this Adult Development class, I learnt a lot about the mental, cognitive, physical, and

socio-emotional components of aging via our class discussions and textbook material. It was

amazing to witness the age and background diversity among our class participants, not

excluding our experiences with the Women of West Oakland and the Sisters of Mercy. It was

a very beneficial learning experience for me to be able to apply the concepts learnt in the

classroom and online to the tangible persons we encountered. From all of the chapters in the

textbook, I discovered many terms for topics that I recognized, but did not comprehend the

real definition and impact that they had on aging. I want to reflect on the different chapters

that we experienced and talk about them and their relevance in respect to aging, as well as the

links that they had with the elderly women that we visited during our tea parties. In chapter

one, Cavanaugh addresses the definition of the lifetime viewpoint, which “divides human

development into two phases: [the] early phase (childhood and adolescence) and [the] later

phase (young adulthood, middle age, and old age)”.The later phase formed the basis for this

lesson; it proved that we were learning about the second portion of life. Another concept that

was seen periodically during the course was multidirectionality. Its definition is

“development entails both growth and loss; when people progress in one area, they may lose

in another and at different rates”. The reason this term was relevant to the class topic is

because it indicated that the dips that occur in life also come with certain benefits as well. If

the older person would be losing their ability to remember what they ate for breakfast, their

ability to remember the past might have improved substantially. There were various instances

where this idea of multidirectionality came into play within our course, whether we were

talking about young adulthood, middle age, or old age. Every age group has its gains and

losses in their aging processes.