The Impact Of Nature, Nurture, Culture, And Diversity On An Individual’s Lifespan

Concept of Nature, Nurture, Culture, and Diversity

Life can be defined as the journey and consists of sequentially following developmental stages. Each and every stage poses a new set of opportunities as well as challenges that every individual have to face and win them successfully (Arnett 2016). Developmental psychologists are of the opinion that human development over the lifespan are an inculcation of physical, cognitive, perceptual, social, intellectual as well as emotional growth and every person often experiences varieties of circumstances that affect their lives positively as well as negatively (Moran 2013). The following report will focus on an individual named Jeanne who had gone through several rough phases in her lives and had been affected in various ways in different stages of life which had several impacts on her personal as well as social lives affecting her mentally. In her context, the concept of nurture, nature, culture and diversity will be discussed that had shaped her lifespan and had created ways which had made her the person she is today. To support the discussion, important theories need to be discussed. These theories include the Erickson’s 7 stage model of psychosocial development, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and others. These theories will help in developing rationale of each of the activities and feelings of the individual which she had developed after her husband’s death. It will help is forming ideas about how different situations in lives have made her become depressed and lonely and had also forced her to cut her social circles although society had tried a lot to help her.

Lifespan can be defined as the average length of life of different kinds of organisms especially in a particular definite environment determined under specific circumstances. Development of lifespan is an integral part of an individual where he or she comes under the influence of nature, nurture, culture and diversity that shapes up the thinking as well as physical well being of the individual helping him to take important decisions in life and to lead life with proper aesthetics and disciplines (Vieluf, Aschersleben and Panxer 2016).  The nature that surrounds the individual had large impacts on his health. The nature being serene with proper elements of life in the right amount in consideration to a nature which is chaotic, polluted and destructive will shape up the individual’s physical well being as well as create mental stability or destroy it respectively and accordingly. Nurturing or effective parenting style is also an important factor that is intricately associated with culture as well. Nurturing includes the process of raising children and educating them in a way that the child becomes able to realise her own potential. Nurturing often requires parenting skill and at the same time makes emotional demands supporting the child at the same time to develop physical, emotional, intellectual as well as emotional capabilities (Csikszentmihalyi and Robinson 2014). Different cultures have different types of parenting styles like Americans following the authoritative nurturing style in comparison to other cultures which provide the authoritarian styles. Culture and diversity mainly contains the different types of races, intersecting identities as well as classes that mould the cognitive skill and infuse disciplines and beliefs as an individual grows and help her to cling on a framework of rules and traditions believed by a culture to make a best human being (Kagitcibaki 2013). However often stereotyping threats, sexual-orientation, religion, caste and others have the potential to affect the human health development negatively of positively (Peterson 2013). In case of the Jeanne it can be seen that she looks up to her mother as she experienced a very comfortable relationship with her mother who have provide her with warmth, love , affection and security trying to infuse in her the best principles and is also supported by her brothers in best ways. Being Congolese, she had grown up with a particular set of traditions and cultures that she respects and have shaped her critical thinking skill. Her teenage marriage is a symptom of Congolese culture which is a norm in such culture and had a baby from her that marriage.

Impact of Nature on Human Health

Jeanne is a 55 year old, Congolese, black lady and is a mother of 5 kids. She is currently based in London. She is self sufficient and has two jobs, one as a cleaner of the nursery and other as a carer. She look up to her mother as role model and her brothers are also very supportive and she respects them a lot. She had a teenage marriage and a child from that marriage. Within teenage only, her husband passed away making it very difficult for her to manage the situation both socially and emotionally. She had gathered courage to make her life stable and remarried again. She had 5 children form the second marriage. However, she again became a widow shattering all her dreams and she completely withdrew herself from the society. A large number of friends and relatives had tried their best to include her in social gatherings but she continued to push them away. She has been recently diagnosed with depression that had greatly impact ted in her quality of life making her feel distressed and vulnerable. The death of her second husband had left him severely devastated as she accepted it that she became both physically and mentally ill as she was not being able to socialise with anyone.

The three important events are separation from her first partner in teenage years, death of the second husband in mid thirties and severe depression and social exclusion in the fifties.  Erikson’s theory of eight stages of psychosocial development helps to clarify the importance of an individual to overcome different psychological impact successfully (Kail and Cavanaugh 2015). This ensures that the individual will develop trait that will help him or her to a healthy adjusted adult and enjoy quality lives. The crisis and task provided by life in each and every of the eight stages will lead to sense of competence developing a healthy personality. He had explained how failure to master the tasks often leads to feelings of inadequacy. For the discussion, Erikson’s three important stages should be discussed. The first stage is the adolescence stage of age 12 to 18 which is termed as identity and role confusion. This age mainly helps in identifying the strong sense of identity and remains true to their beliefs and values after facing different perspectives of people and problems. Failing to do so, make the individual confused and unsure of their identity (Robinson, Demetre and Litman 2016). In this stage, she has been seen to be a single mother facing difficulties in life and therefore she had not been able to perform the correct identification of her aims in life. Detachment from previous partner at a tender age made her socially detached and she failed to accomplish the main tasks of the age. The next stage is the intimacy stage versus the isolation stage that begins from early 20s and continues till early 40s. After development of self identification characteristics, this stage mainly guides in sharing the lives with others and develop a successful intimate relationship. However this stage is entirely dependent upon the previous stage for its success. A person who does not develop the sense of self concept may experience loneliness and emotional isolation (Lekes et al. 2016). In the case of the patient, she had already experienced failure in self realisation due to the tragedy which impacted this stage as well. However in the stage, his second husband also passed away creating deep emotional trauma for her. Her failure to establish both the stages successfully affected her social life and for this reason she completely withdrew from the situations. The third stage is the generativity versus stagnation phase that begin from 40s and continue to 60s. This stage mainly depends on contributing to the development of the society and also others by volunteering, mentoring and raising children. Adults give birth to children enhancing their generation and race. However, all the tasks had been already completed by her as their culture had resulted the sense of giving birth to babies in the previous stage when she should have concentrated more on intimacy. Moreover, separation of partners had automatically affected this step and as she was emotionally and mentally unstable to perform such tasks, she has experienced stagnation (Eve and Kangas 2015). Although she is working as carer and cleaner but the works had not given her satisfaction as she remained consumed with loneliness due to her husband’s death. Therefore she had little connection with the social world and has published her social life away making hr socially excluded. This gave rise to depression in her. Although her mother and brothers had been caring and affectionate towards her, they could not help her overcome these stages successfully for which nurturing could not be considered to be totally efficient in the culture. According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the most important needs in a person sequentially are physiological needs which lead to safety needs, social belonging, esteem and self actualisation (Sortheix and Schwartz 2017). Although the individual, had proper physiological needs, she felt insecure due to a lonely life without a partner as she was not self confident and urged for a partner for which she remarried. Failure in these aspects made her suffer the third stage as well which is social exclusion and did not have proper self esteem and self actualisation as well. The entire hierarchy of needs have totally crashed down for her making her depressed. Increased depression can make her vulnerable to self harm and will make her apathetic and destroy her quality of life (Stevernick 2014).

Conclusion:

An individual needs to properly nurtured in a way that she becomes self sufficient and self independent and confident enough to tackle different situations effectively. Failure to perform the different challenges that life provides may indulge the individual in severe depression. The person has to develop the ability to overcome the negative feelings and emerge out victorious. Her upbringing and culture had not been able to infuse in her the sense of self sufficiency and therefore she had depended upon a second partner. Erikson’s models have shown that her activities had failed her to overcome the tasks that lifespan provided individuals to develop a quality life. Maslow’s hierarchy for needs also states that her needs have not been achieved and as a reason she has lost her mental and emotional stability and is suffering from depression.

References:

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