The Study of Adult Development

Marcus Tullius Cicero, after whom Teuffel named his Ciceronian period of the Golden Age. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

An acquaintance here at "the home" has tried to establish a book review club and invited me to participate. I agreed to give a book review in August. I thought that would give me time to prepare if I couldn't get out of it. The other side of that is it will give me the opportunity to talk about something that has been enlightening to me. I love the study of Adult Development--a relatively new area in the field of psychology. Child Development has been around for a hundred years or so, but nobody took a look at how adults develop beyond maturity at around 20 until almost the middle of the 20th century.

There have been a few people who commented on aging and developmental concepts like Cicero's De Senectute  and the Bible in various places,  but it wasn't backed up by any data or scientific records until the results of the Grant Study published in 1977 in George Vaillant's book Adaptation to Life.  One well-known book based on the study was Passages by Gail Sheehy, but her book was sort of pirated from the study. The Grant Study participants were exclusively male sophomore students at Harvard University. The author applied results to women, however, at the time the study was conducted, women were not questioned, interviewed, or followed.  


When the study was conducted, women were not big participants in the workplace. Their lives were not comparable to the men in the study. Daniel Levinson did write a developmental study of women's lives called Season's of a Woman's Life after he wrote Season's of a Man's Life. He dealt with some of the differences in the lives of men and women. It seemed that Sheehy applied the results of the Grant Study to women without the integrity of using women as a base of investigation.

The results are becoming more universally accepted as education and employment have become more equally accessed by men and women. I found the study of Adult Development fascinating. It has provided me with anticipation as I age. There are still summits to climb and battles to fight. Getting old has been saddled with a bad rap. Lets don't give up till it over.