Rilang Chen
Sminer126G
Teddy Chocos
September 15, 2014
Stages of life
Life time is like a straight line, it only goes one way. Erik Erikson cuts this line and
lets them signify different life period such as infancy, early childhood, preschool,
school age, adolescence, young adulthood, middle adulthood and maturity. After read
his psychosocial stages summary chart which explains different ages period have
different basic conflict, important events and outcome, I have a better understanding
about problems that people who is from different ages are facing. Especially, I have a
better understanding about myself and my age period.
In my opinion, the Erikson’s Psychosocial Stages Summary Chart is good enough
to be a summary chart, and it is reasonable and logical. However, it can’t cover all the
cases in real life. There is a Chinese phrase says that a child from poor family will early
become the brace of family. It means that a poor environment would force people to
quickly adapt it and become more mature, otherwise people would be eliminated. This
phrase also fixes in with someone’s life such as people who from the third world. The
real life or people is much complicated than what the chart is showing to us. On the
other hand, the Erikson’s Psychosocial Stages Summary Chart perfectly describes how
the society value the young labor force from people who is young age. And it is showing
that ability is an important part in human development.
If I have a chance to choose a stage to be in, I would choose the infancy. Because
infancy means anything is possible, my future could be anything. People always say
time is money or time is precious. That is why infant is most valuable in our society,
even in animal world, infants are always protected by elders. However, infants mentally
and physically are the weakest in all the stages, and they don’t have any experiences
about problems which relate to society or financial condition. Anyway, comparing with
other stages, infants still have a lot of time to learn and increase their abilities, and stand
on the shoulder of giants then finish the goals which the elders missed.
Personally, I don’t like to be maturity, because I like to keep myself alive and
young. In the Erikson’s Psychosocial Stages Summary Chart, it shows that older adults
should reflect their life. For me, I don’t have any time to look back, especially, in the
end of life, time is much valuable at that time. If we have time to look back or regret,
we should use them to finish the things we haven’t done. In my opinion, reflection is
for people who already died, so they might have a lot of time to think about themselves
and take a long rest.
Different societies have different expectation about what people should do in
different ages. For example, during war time, teens are expected to join in the army and
protect their country, but in a peaceful age, teens are expected to study in school and
increase the abilities. Moreover, different families or different cultures have different
values. For example, a child who is from an athletic family is expected to be an athlete,
so academic knowledge might not be so necessary for him. On the other hand, some
cultures extremely value knowledge from books, so people who live with this culture
might not be very flexible or agile. In our life, society or world, people should be
diversified no matter what age they are. Only people are being themselves could make
this world more balanced.