Chapter 1

After reading chapter one, The Life-Span Perspective really caught my eye especially coming from personal experience. When the topic that "Development is Multidirectional" (Berger, 10) it made me think about the changes within the past decade of my life. I went through puberty in the past 10 years, I lost some really closed loved ones, I gained an amazing little boy in my life. Reading about when a man's wife dies hit close to home and I found it interesting because my mom is a widow and I got a bit more of a perspective on things. When started reading about the multicontextual perspective of development and talking about the three nested levels that affect us and bringing up the topic about socioeconomic status or whether your working class or middle class. The multicultural part I thought was really cool because every single generation within our families has brought something new and we can learn about different cultures just within our own families. The multidisciplinary part was very interesting because life span can be divided into three parts; childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Development is also segmented into three different parts; biological, cognitive, and social. It was definitely interesting to read about. I thought the section "Development is Plastic" was a little strange due to the fact, I don't really understand how plastic can be related to hope and realism. I know plastic is durable and can be molded but to me it made absolutely no sense. I guess that is because to me it is just an odd concept to think about. I did think overall the section was very interesting.