Developmental Transitions

Exploring stability and change through the lifespan

Sarah Crafter, Rachel Maunder, Laura Soulsby

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317231479
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Histoire et théorie en psychologie

How can we make sense of change and stability through the lifespan of human development? What role does personal experience, our relationships with others, and historical and sociocultural contexts play in shaping these changes? This is the first book to offer an integrative overview of the range of developmental transitions which occur through the lifespan. Bringing together different theoretical and conceptual perspectives and a broad range of empirical research including quantitative and qualitative approaches, this book encompasses a range of complex transitional forms. Covering topics such as health transitions, transitions in friendships and romantic relationships, career transitions, and societal transitions, this book takes the reader beyond a focus on childhood and adolescence, to look at the whole lifespan. Reflecting a perspective that takes into account a sociocultural past and present, this book seeks to show how transitions can be viewed as both an experience of uncertainty and possibility. Transitions perform important functions and present psychosocial opportunities. Developmental Transitions is essential reading for all undergraduate and graduate students of developmental and cultural psychology and is also a valuable resource for academics and practitioner audiences interested in stability and change as people age.

1
An Introduction to Developmental Transitions

Our orientation

For the last two decades the authors of this book have been working with the concept of transition in some capacity within our fields of exploration in psychology. We have written this book because the way in which transition is treated has been wide-ranging and therefore worthy of greater scrutiny. This applies to our own work as well as the as the work of others. Our aim in this book is to draw the substantial body of work in transition to foreground the different conceptualisations that have been used within developmental psychology and related subject areas and to explore the range of complex transitional forms across the lifespan.

Our decision to study development across the lifespan reflects four key concerns. The first is that the treatment of transitions within developmental psychology is overweighed towards childhood and adolescence, with much less emphasis on adulthood and later life. The second is that particular transitions tend to be studied within the boundaries of their own literature base (such as starting school or becoming a parent) which makes it more difficult to extract emerging patterns relating to the contribution of these transitions for ongoing development. The third is that the term ‘transition’ also tends to be commonly applied to some forms of change rather than others. For example, moving from primary school to secondary school is frequently referred to as transition, as is starting university or moving to a new country. However, life events such as bereavement, or receiving a serious medical diagnosis are not necessarily formally articulated as transitions in the same way, meaning that literature from these different arenas is rarely studied together.

Finally, this body of work encompasses transitions in a variety of forms. For example, developmental psychology has most commonly used age-related transitions where movements or change are linked with growing maturity and the contextual change brought about by this. Transitions can also be physical, such as a movement from one context to another. Other transitions are psychological and have the power to alter our sense of self. These different forms are not mutually exclusive. This book aims to compile a series of chapters that encompasses a range of complex transitional forms across the lifespan. As such, many of the theories we draw on do not necessarily present themselves as transition but speak to the different features of transition that we are now going to explore in more depth.

The study of ‘development’ in transitions

The study of development in psychology has been fundamentally concerned with both physical and psychological change and stability as people get older. These concerns have led scholars interested in development to ask questions about what kinds of changes occur across the lifespan, how do we change between childhood and adulthood and what role do our experiences, social and historical contexts, and our relationships with others play in shaping those changes? More importantly, how should developmental change be best understood – as a set of stage or step-wise changes, a smooth trajectory from one point to another or a set of multiple pathways and trajectories? One thing is clear, people’s lives are deeply influenced and, in some cases, troubled by transitions which may lead to uncertainty and force us to confront our own understandings of who we are and how we situate ourselves in the world.

Let us start with an example from a large longitudinal study titled the ‘Great Smoky Mountains Study’ based in south-eastern United States. The authors studied the mental health changes of 1,420 children and young people at intermittent times from the age of 9 until they were 26 years old. The study was designed to analyse the development of anxiety disorders from childhood to adulthood (Copeland, Angold, Shanahan, & Costello, 2014). When the study reported strong links between childhood anxiety and other common adult anxiety disorders (such as panic and agoraphobia) the findings were reported in an online newsletter for a research foundation. Upon reading the findings a woman, who we shall name Kay, wrote about her own life in the comment section of the newsletter website:

I remember when I was a child, back in 1990, my elderly adoptive mother would help me with my homework. When I sensed she was getting frustrated from my lack of understanding the work, I would start to cry, could barely speak and start to tremble. She then would give me some water, hug me and we would take a break before trying again. She had passed away when I had turned 10 years old back in ’95. Around the age of 16, I remember spending a lot of time alone during the weekends. I would use that time to either take care of my African Canadian hair or sleep a lot. When I had finally landed a nice computer job at 22 years old, I found myself leaving for the washroom and would cry for about 5 minutes. After a while I realized that this wasn’t normal and had seen a psychologist. She had helped me a lot. After my elderly adoptive father had passed away, I decided to go back to school to get my degree in ECE [Early Childhood Education] to work with children. It was the best decision I had made. From time to time I still suffer from GAD [Generalised Anxiety Disorder] but I’ve learned to lean on the right people (therapist, close family or friends) and to perform certain activities (meditation, journaling, exercise, social interaction, etc.).

https://bbrfoundation.org/brain-matters-discoveries/landmark-study-shows-childhood-anxiety-may-transition-to-mental-illness-in

Even though the details of Kay’s life are scarce, her brief narrative about her life is punctuated by some potentially significant transitional moments. For example, at some point in her earlier childhood she was adopted, she found her home studies to be challenging and this led to internalised feelings of anxiety. She lost her adoptive mother at a young age, much of her teenage years were spent in isolation and she clearly links her early feelings of anxiety to some of her adult experiences at work. Her decision to see a psychologist and the death of her adoptive father appear to pre-empt a major turning point in her life, which is the return to education. However, her anxiety sometimes returns but her collective experiences have enacted a change in the way she deals with her psychological challenges in adulthood.

Kay’s story points to the complexity of attempting to understand developmental change and stability as transitions. The dictionary definition suggests that transition is the change from one state or stage to another. This definition works quite well if we confine the application of the word to the movement from state A to state B. Things become a little more complicated when we are talking about human development and psychological change across a life course because the child is often perceived as being in a process of ‘becoming’ or ‘developing’ (Valsiner, 2008). Therefore, the notion of endpoints to states becomes very fuzzy. Equally, changes to the way we perceive ourselves might occur quite gradually or very suddenly. Some changes are very large, whilst others are micro changes. For example, life-threatening illness can be a dramatic catalyst for change. Moving to a new school is often assumed to have a big impact on an individual and yet being moved to a different class might be downplayed. A seemingly small change has the potential to create a larger impact on an individual than a major change.

In addition, there is a tendency in some psychological literature to present transitions as ‘stressful life events’ or ‘crises’, which automatically positions them as problematic, undesirable and with negative outcomes. Whilst transitions can certainly pose challenges for those experiencing them, it is important to understand how and why they can cause discomfort, alongside the purposes they can serve. Moreover, many transitions can institute change that is positive and make our lives better. Sociocultural perspectives propose that the inner re-orientation that occurs in order to adapt to changing circumstances can have important functions, and present opportunities for individuals. Our orientation within this book is to consider the contextual factors operating on individuals, and how the nature and experience of transition is shaped by social and cultural factors.

Conceptualising developmental change as steps and stages

Progress, as a key part of change and development, has been a central feature of theoretical and methodological thinking within developmental psychology. The notion of ‘progress’ relies on the idea that something qualitatively new will emerge out of change. In developmental psychology, it is through a process of maturation that the new ways of thinking, being or feeling predominantly occur. These theories became known as normative or stage-related theories because change is viewed as organised, sequential, chronological and universal to all children (Kessen, 1962). So powerful has the connection between change and maturation become, that it has underpinned many of the key ideas of developmental psychology during the mid-21st century (Kallio & Marchand, 2012). In turn, the knowledge borne out of developmental psychology’s understanding of change and maturation is invoked widely by professionals, services, institutions, politics, parents and the wider social milieu.

Jean Piaget (1986–1980), who dedicated much of his career to understanding maturational progress, is perhaps the most well-known proponent of stage-related development. He was interested in children’s cognitive development, particularly focusing on how children actively construct their knowledge of the world based on their experiences. This change occurred, he claimed, through the adaptation and assimilation of new experiences into existing schemas, which are the knowledge structures that Piaget believed underlie all thinking (Piaget & Cook, 1952). Schemas are changed or transformed though the accommodation, or modification, of a schema to take into account both the old and new experience (Piaget & Inhelder, 1969).

Using interviews, observations and experiments he concluded that all children go through the same stages of development, though their speed might vary. For example, a child under 8 months old may not be able to represent a reality where their parent still exists when they are out of sight but by 6 years old, children are capable of many complex internalised mental operations. Including, of course, their ability to mentally represent a family member being in a different context. For Piaget, 19 years of age reflected the final goal or endpoint of children’s cognitive development, having reached their capacity to logically reason, plan and imagine.

Piaget’s work ran in conjunction with, and no doubt highly influenced, a range of similar stage-related theories. Notable examples include Kohlberg’s sex-role development stages (Kohlberg, 1966) and his theory of moral development (Kohlberg, 1976). Erikson’s (1950) psychosocial theory of development has two significant features; the first is that his stage-related theory focuses on the whole lifespan and the second is that he was interested in cultural and social factors, rather than biological drives. In his quest to understand identity development at each stage of people’s lives, change centres around some kind of crises or conflict between the ‘psycho’ and the ‘social’, which needs to be resolved in some way (Erikson, 1975). Failure to resolve the task could lead to a break in the continuity of development and problems with the subsequent stage.

A key premise underlying stage-related approaches is that change is universally experienced in the same way in all human groups (though Erikson emphasised how social context can significantly influence that experience). The defining characteristics of this perspective suggest that development is i) sequential, ii) one-directional, iii) contains an end state, iv) is irreversible, v) that the transformation is structural and vi) universal (see Baltes, 1979). Let us turn now to some of the critiques of these underlying assumptions reframing transition as a ‘process’ rather than a series of stages.

Conceptualising transitions: from endpoints to process

Age-graded or normative transitions as described by stage-related approaches have been a useful way in which to frame children’s developmental growth and change. Equally, there are a number of problems with only viewing change, and indeed transition, as either a stage, endpoint in time or outcome. In this book we seek to build on the work of scholars who have considered transition as a process as well as a product. In doing so, we believe this provides a theoretical and conceptual means to avoid some of the chief concerns associated with stage-related approaches to transition. We would suggest that some of those chief concerns could be proposed along the following lines:

1. ‘Normalising’ patterns of development’ – If we assume that our development from childhood into adulthood and subsequently old age follows as a series of stages then we must also assume there is a standardised or ‘normative’ pattern in which most people go through these stages. This presents problems to those who sit outside the parameters of what any given society considers ‘normative’
2. ‘Age-related focus on development’ – developmental psychology has almost exclusively viewed any developmental change as related to chronological age. We will suggest that individuals progress in very different ways and that regression or stasis is also a strong feature with the life course that is not necessarily bound by age
3. ‘Culture, context and history’ – stage-related developmental psychology views change as universal to all children thereby undervaluing the role of culture, context, person-environment interaction and individual, community and generational histories

Before getting into these concerns and what possible alt...