Life Span Perspective Paper
Life Span development 1.
The development of a human through the course of a lifetime seems to big a rather huge subject to try to explain when you think of how different everyone is affected by the world they live in. If you believe that we are all products of our own experiences than you can understand how two people can grow up in the same house and grow up to be two completely different types of adults. Every bump in the road of a human’s life will push them in a certain direction and will have different affects on different people. How we grow as humans, both mentally and physically, are believed to be the byproduct of our infancy. This is life span development had its beginning.
Life span development or human development finds its roots located with early philosophers who tried to explain the many differences in people of different ages. Philosophers were curious to finding out why infants, that have a very similar infancy stage can grow up to be completely different adults. How can one infant grow up to be good and one grow up to be bad? Philosophers researched both internal and external influences and the affects that they had on development. There are three main ideas of focus involving development. The first is Original sin which states that children are born with a selfish nature due to the sins of Adam and Eve. The second is innate goodness which states that people are all born naturally good and that goodness is always reaching positive inputs and influences that will help a person grow. The third idea contradicts both of the previous ideas and is called the Blank Slate which believes that a child is born with a clean slate and develops directly from all of the input provided him by his parents. Charles Darwin and other evolutionists used the study of early childhood development to help understand...