Understanding Human Development Across Time Lecture 3

Age, gender and turning points • The perceived turning points occur across the entire life course but they usually cluster at mid-life • There are gender differences regarding turning points Women: have more turning points in the family domimain Men: have more turning points in the work domain Major themes of the life course perspective 1. Interplay of human live and historical time • LCP asserts that individual and family development must be understood in a historical context • Persons born in different years face different historical worlds, options, and constraints • Historical time produce cohort effects when distinctive formative experiences are shared at the same point in the life course and have a lasting impact on a birth cohort • The same historical events may affect different cohorts in different ways Major themes of the life course perspective 2. Timing of lives • Timing of lives entails the particular roles and be behaviour are associated with particular age groups base on biological age, psychological age, social age and spiritual age • Every society uses age as an important variable, and many social institutions are organized around age: Age for starting school, age of marriage, retirement age, etc. Statements on age: “Terrible 2s”, “sweet 16”, “20-something”, “Life begins at 40”, “senior discounts”, “60 is the new 40”. They are telling about age and associates behaviour • Age is also a prominent attribute in effort by social scientist to bring order and predictability to our understanding of human behaviour • Life course scholars are interested at which specific life events and transition occur which they refer to as the Timing lives • They may classify entrances and exits from particular statuses and roles as “off-time” or “on-time” based on social norms or shared expectations about the time of such transition example • Child labour and child bearing in adolescence are considered off-time in Western countries, but in much of the developing world (e.g. Africa, including Malawi) such timing of roles is seen as a part of the natural order • Death in early or middle adulthood is considered offtime in developed countries, but, because it is a common phenomenon in much of Sub-Saharan Africa due to the HIV/AIDS epidemic is it not viewed as offtime. Dimension of age • Biological age: a person’s level of development and physical health • Psychological age: behaviour and perception age • Social age: the age-graded roles and behaviour expected by society/ the social constructed meaning of various age • Spiritual age: a person’s position in the ongoing search for meaning, purpose and moral relationships Age structuring/stratification/age categorization/standardization in time of lives • Society standardize the age at which social role transition occur through policies and laws regulating the timing of those transitions • For instance, compulsory education, child labour driving, drinking, being tried as adult, marrying holding public office and receiving pensions Major themes of the life course perspective 3. Linked or interdependent lives • Liked lives refers to the interdependence of human lives and the ways in which people are reciprocally connected on several level • Human lives are interdependent, and the family is the primary arena for experiencing and interpreting wider historical, cultural and social phenomena • It calls attention to how relationships both support and control an individual’s behaviour-relationships also control behaviour through expectation, rewards and punishments Links between family members • Parents’ lives are influenced by the trajectories of their children’s lives, • Examples parents may forgo early retirement to assist their young adult children with education expenses Parents may be negative affected by stressful situations that their children face (e.g. mothers and daughters) • Likewise, children’s lives may be influenced by the trajectory of their parents’ lives (e.g. parental divorce) Links with the wider world • Families and individual are also linked to situations in the wider society (e.g. economic institutions) • Individual and family life course trajectories are linked to situations in the labour market, the housing market, and education system For instance, changes in the labour market may drive the delayed departure of young adult from parental