Transcript Chapter 13

Chapter 13:
Middle Adulthood
(34 – 60 Years)
Middle Adulthood (34 – 60 Years)
• Chapter Objectives
– To examine the world of work as a context for
development, focusing on interpersonal
demands, authority relations, and demands
for the acquisition of new skills; considering
midlife career changes; examining the
interaction of work and family life; and
examining the impact of joblessness in middle
adulthood
Middle Adulthood (34 – 60 Years)
• Chapter Objectives (cont.)
– To examine the process of maintaining a vital
intimate relationship in middle adulthood,
especially a commitment to growth, effective
communication, creative use of conflict, and
preserving passion
– To describe the expansion of caring in middle
adulthood as it applies to two specific roles:
that of parent and that of an adult child caring
for one’s aging parents
Middle Adulthood (34 – 60 Years)
• Chapter Objectives (cont.)
– To analyze the tasks required for the effective
management of the household and their
impact on the cognitive, social, and emotional
development of family members
– To explain the psychosocial crisis of
generativity versus stagnation and the central
processes through which the crisis is
resolved: person-environment interaction and
creativity. To define the primary adaptive ego
strength of care and the core pathology of
rejectivity
Middle Adulthood (34 – 60 Years)
• Chapter Objectives (cont.)
– To apply a psychosocial analysis to the issue
of discrimination in the workplace with special
focus on the cost to society as well as to the
individual when discrimination operates to
restrict career access and advancement
Middle Adulthood (34 – 60 Years)
• Managing a Career: Achieving New Levels of
Competence in the World of Work
– Understanding and managing leadership and
authority
• One must identify the authority structure operating
in the work setting and begin to establish a position
in it
• Career advancement means assuming leadership
in some areas, while recognizing and cooperating
with the leadership of others
• Leadership is a relationship among people;
leaders provide a sense of vision or direction; and
leaders have an impact on getting the group to
work toward achieving its vision
Middle Adulthood (34 – 60 Years)
• Managing a Career: Achieving New Levels of
Competence in the World of Work (cont.)
– Expanding interpersonal relationships
• Most occupations place a great deal of emphasis
on the development and use of interpersonal skills,
especially the ability to interact well with customers
and co-workers, and the ability to communicate
effectively as underlying criteria in the selection
and promotion process
Middle Adulthood (34 – 60 Years)
• Managing a Career: Achieving New Levels of
Competence in the World of Work (cont.)
– Meeting new skill demands
• The characteristics of the occupation and the work
setting determine what kinds of work-related skills
will dominate the adult’s energies
• Substantive complexity is the degree to which the
work requires thought, independent judgment, and
frequent decision making
• Intellectual flexibility is the ability to handle
conflicting information, grasp several perspectives
on a problem, and reflect on one’s own values and
solutions
Middle Adulthood (34 – 60 Years)
• Managing a Career: Midlife Career Changes
– A management of a career does not
necessarily mean remaining within the same
occupational structure throughout adult life
– Between the ages of 18 and 30 a young
person is likely to have held 7.5 jobs
Middle Adulthood (34 – 60 Years)
• Managing a Career: Midlife Career Changes
(cont.)
– Work activities or work-related goals may
change for at least 5 reasons
• Careers end during middle adulthood (athlete)
• Cannot resolve conflicts between job demands and
personal goals
• Realization that one has succeeded as much as
possible in a given career
Middle Adulthood (34 – 60 Years)
• Managing a Career: Midlife Career Changes
(cont.)
– Work activities or work-related goals may
change for at least 5 reasons (cont.)
• Women decided to make a greater commitment to
career once their children are in high school or
college
• With the restructuring of the workforce, some
workers are laid off and cannot be rehired in the
same field
Middle Adulthood (34 – 60 Years)
• Managing a Career: Balancing Work and Family
Life
– Almost everyone manages a career while
juggling commitments to spouse, children,
parents, other household members, and
friends
– Role overload occurs as a result of too many
demands and expectations to handle in the
time allowed
– Role conflict refers to ways that the demands
and expectations of various roles conflict with
each other
Middle Adulthood (34 – 60 Years)
• Managing a Career: Balancing Work and Family
Life (cont.)
– Role spillover occurs when the demands or
preoccupations about one role interfere with
the ability to carry out another role
– The combination of role overload, role conflict,
and role spillover can lead to reduced
satisfaction at work and in family roles
– Areas of conflict that arise in dual-earner
couples often focus on the management of
household tasks and child care
Middle Adulthood (34 – 60 Years)
• Managing a Career: The Impact of Joblessness
– There is a difference in how people cope with
seasonal or short-term (less than 5 weeks)
unemployment and chronic unemployment
– Job loss has been associated with both
physical and psychological consequences,
such as self-doubt, passivity, and social
withdrawal
Middle Adulthood (34 – 60 Years)
Middle Adulthood (34 – 60 Years)
• Nurturing an Intimate Relationship
– Although people derive a significant sense of
personal identity from their jobs and may
worry a lot about them, happiness in an
intimate relationship is a stronger predictor of
overall well-being in adulthood than is
satisfaction with work
– Partners must be committed to growth both as
individuals and as a couple
– Caring and acceptance of each other deepen
as each person willingly permits changes in
attitudes, needs, and interest in the other
Middle Adulthood (34 – 60 Years)
• Nurturing an Intimate Relationship (cont.)
– The couple must develop an effective
communication system
– For many couples who do not have an
effective communication system, resentments
accumulate with no opportunity to resolve
them
– A vital marriage is sustained through the
couple’s ability to make creative use of
conflict
Middle Adulthood (34 – 60 Years)
• Nurturing an Intimate Relationship (cont.)
– Although high levels of negativity and discord
are disruptive to a marriage, some amount of
conflict must be permitted in order to sustain
the sense of individuality that is central to a
vital marriage
– As a rule, levels of conflict and hostility are
greater within the family than they are at the
workplace or in the community
Middle Adulthood (34 – 60 Years)
• Case Study: The Struggle for Commitment to
Growth in a Vital Marriage
– Thought Questions
• What are the obstacles to continued growth for
Annette in this case?
• How might childrearing responsibilities prevent
new growth for women or men in middle
adulthood?
• How does Annette’s decision lead to new
opportunities for growth for Gary and her children?
• What are some alternatives that Annette might
have considered that could have satisfied her
needs for continued growth and perhaps been less
disruptive for her family?
Middle Adulthood (34 – 60 Years)
• Case Study: The Struggle for Commitment to
Growth in a Vital Marriage (cont.)
– Thought Questions (cont.)
• Imagine that Gary had been the one looking for a
new structure - perhaps going into business for
himself or going back to school for a new
profession. What types of changes might this have
had on the family system? On the marital
relationship?
Middle Adulthood (34 – 60 Years)
• Nurturing an Intimate Relationship: Preserving
Passion in Long-Term Relationships
– According to Sternberg’s three-dimensional
model of love, passion is the first thing to go
– Preserving an erotic and sexual aspect to
intimacy continues to play a role in fostering
vital relationships
– Nurturing vitality in an intimate relationship is
a long-term task
Middle Adulthood (34 – 60 Years)
• Expanding Caring Relationships: Parenting
– In parenting we see the critical intersection of
adult development and child development
– Adults bring a psychosocial history of ego
strengths and core pathologies, coping skills
and defenses, and adequate or inadequate
resolutions of previous psychosocial crises to
the task of nurturing a child
– The parenting alliance is defined as the
capacity of a spouse to acknowledge, respect,
and value the parenting roles and tasks of the
partner
Middle Adulthood (34 – 60 Years)
• Expanding Caring Relationships: Parenting
(cont.)
– Being a parent is a difficult, demanding task
that requires a great deal of learning
– Developmental stages of the family
• The years when children are in early and middle
childhood
• The years when children are adolescents
• The years when no children are living at home
• Grandparenthood
Middle Adulthood (34 – 60 Years)
• Expanding Caring Relationships: Caring for
One’s Aging Parents
– What is filial obligation? – Feeling of
responsibility to care for one’s parents
– Who provides help? – Evidence suggests that
daughters assume much more of the
responsibility of their aging parents than do
sons
Middle Adulthood (34 – 60 Years)
• Expanding Caring Relationships: Caring for
One’s Aging Parents (cont.)
– What factors promote an optimal relationship
between adults and their aging parents?
• The adult parent-child relationship is one of choice
• Adult children are sometimes in a position of trying
to supplement the care and support they provide
their parents by coordinating social services and
agencies
• Research on caregiving within the family has
begun to examine the rewards as well as the costs
in its relationship
Middle Adulthood (34 – 60 Years)
• Case Study: A Daughter Cares for Her Ailing
Mother
– Thought Questions
• How would you describe the costs of caregiving in
this case?
• How would you describe the rewards of caregiving
in this case?
• From what you can gather, what is the quality of
the mother-daughter relationship in this case?
• What role might caring for her dying mother play in
Lois’s development as an adult?
Middle Adulthood (34 – 60 Years)
• Managing the Household: Managing Resources
and Meeting Needs and Building Networks and
Coalitions
– Household is a term that describes an entity
that is created by people for a particular style
of living
– The value of the many tasks required to
establish and maintain a supportive
household environment is difficult to assess
– The household system has the potential for
providing an environment is a developmental
task for the middle adult years
Middle Adulthood (34 – 60 Years)
• Managing the Household: Managing Resources
and Meeting Needs and Building Networks and
Coalitions (cont.)
– One of the most difficult and subtle kinds of
new leaning that occurs during middle
adulthood is the development of an
understanding of how the structures of other
organizations affect one’s life and the lives of
family members
Middle Adulthood (34 – 60 Years)
• Managing the Household: Remarriage and
Blended Families
– About 40% of marriages involve a remarriage
for the bride, the groom, or both
– In remarriage, partners must find ways to
create boundaries around the blended family
so that children can benefit from the love and
support of their parents, grandparents, and
other relatives while protecting the new family
from unwanted intrusions and pressures for
competing loyalties
Middle Adulthood (34 – 60 Years)
• Managing the Household: One-Parent Families
– About 32% of all families are one-parent
families
– The greatest stressor for single mothers is the
lack of financial resources
– In addition to the stresses of poverty, single
parents may suffer from social isolation,
continuous pressure to meet the needs of
their children, and experiencing overload in
trying to combine work, parenting, and
household decision making without a partner
Middle Adulthood (34 – 60 Years)
• Managing the Household: People Who Live
Alone
– Approximately 26 million people lived alone in
1998 in America
– Little is known about the differences in
psychosocial development between adults
who live alone and those who live with others
Middle Adulthood (34 – 60 Years)
• The Psychosocial Crisis: Generativity Versus
Stagnation
– Generativity is the capacity to contribute to the
quality of life for future generations
– Stagnation is a lack of psychological
movement or growth during middle adulthood
that may result from self-aggrandizement or
from the inability to cope with developmental
tasks
Middle Adulthood (34 – 60 Years)
• Case Study: My Leadership Journey
– Thought Questions
• What kinds of changes did Lourie Compos
experience as a result of the Women’s Health
Leadership training experience?
• What evidence does the case provide about
generative concern? Generative commitment?
Generative action? Generative narrative?
• How did the experience of expanding he social
network of professionals outside of her job
contribute to Lourie’s psychosocial development?
Middle Adulthood (34 – 60 Years)
• Case Study: My Leadership Journey (cont.)
– Thought Questions (cont.)
• What lessons can be learned from this case about
how to support and nurture a sense of generativity
in middle adulthood and how to overcome feelings
of stagnation?
• What role does the environment play in promoting
generativity? Can you think of some examples of
community programs of workplace initiative that
may foster psychosocial development in
adulthood?
Middle Adulthood (34 – 60 Years)
• The Central Process: Person Environment
Interaction and Creativity
– Person Environment Interaction is personal
growth that depends on the interaction
between a person’s needs, skills, and
interpersonal style and the demands of the
environments in which he or she is embedded
– Creativity is the willingness to abandon old
forms or patterns of doing things and to think
in new ways
Middle Adulthood (34 – 60 Years)
• The Prime Adaptive Ego Quality and the Core
Pathology
– Care is the commitment to be concerned
– Rejectivity is the unwillingness to include
certain others or groups of others in one’s
generative concerns
Middle Adulthood (34 – 60 Years)
• Applied Topic: Discrimination in the Workplace
– Middle adults in leadership positions who, by
deliberate practice or informal example, set a
tone that promotes the exclusion of certain
workers on the basis of age gender, racial or
ethnic group characteristics
– Others in middle adulthood suffer from
discriminatory policies and are unable to
reach the levels of achievement and
contribution that their talents merit
Middle Adulthood (34 – 60 Years)
• Applied Topic: Discrimination in the Workplace
(cont.)
– Social policies and practices that interfere
with individuals; ability to perform meaningful
work, or to achieve recognition and respect
for their work, pose a hazard to individual
psychosocial development and to the future o
the social group