3.6 Social-Emotional Development Across the Lifespan

Urie Bronfenbrenner described development as shaped by layers of environment, like nested circles around a child.

• Microsystem: people and groups in direct contact with you, such as family, friends, classmates and teachers.
• Mesosystem: the connections between parts of your microsystem, like how your parents and teachers communicate.
• Exosystem: settings that affect you indirectly, such as a parent's workplace or the local school board.
• Macrosystem: the broader culture, values, laws and economic conditions.
• Chronosystem: the dimension of time: your current life stage and the changes and historical events you live through.

Researchers describe parenting styles by how demanding and how responsive parents are. Authoritarian parents set strict rules and expect obedience without explanation ('Because I said so'). Authoritative parents set clear rules but explain them, listen and are warm. Permissive parents are warm but set few rules. In much US research, authoritative parenting is linked with the best outcomes, such as self-reliance and social skill, but the effects of each style differ across cultures.

Attachment is an emotional bond with a caregiver. Infants with secure attachment use their caregiver as a safe base for exploring, are upset when the caregiver leaves and are easily comforted when they return. Insecure attachment comes in three forms: avoidant (shows little distress and avoids the caregiver), anxious (clings, is very upset and hard to comfort) and disorganized (confused or contradictory behavior). Attachment patterns vary across cultures. A child's temperament, their inborn emotional style (easygoing or easily upset, for example), affects how they attach.

Separation anxiety is distress when apart from a caregiver or around strangers, common in later infancy. Harry Harlow's studies with infant monkeys showed that comfort matters more than food for attachment: the monkeys clung to a soft cloth 'mother' rather than a wire 'mother' that gave milk.

Young children engage in parallel play (playing side by side without interacting much) and pretend play. Adolescents increasingly rely on peers. They also show a kind of egocentrism: the imaginary audience is the feeling that everyone is watching and judging you, and the personal fable is the belief that you're unique and invulnerable ('That won't happen to me').

Adolescents work on identity. James Marcia described four identity statuses: achievement (explored options and committed), moratorium (actively exploring, not yet committed), foreclosure (committed without exploring, often adopting parents' choices) and diffusion (neither exploring nor committed). Identity includes ethnic, gender, sexual, religious, occupational and family identities, and teens often imagine possible selves they might become.

Culture shapes adulthood. The social clock is a culture's expected timing for life events, like finishing school, marrying or retiring. Some cultures have a period of emerging adulthood, roughly 18 to 25, between adolescence and full independence. Adults form families or family-like relationships for mutual support, and childhood attachment styles can influence adult relationships.

Erik Erikson proposed that every stage of life, from infancy to old age, brings its own psychosocial conflict, and how you resolve it shapes the next stage. He built the theory by reworking Freud's ideas, but you won't be tested on Freud's psychosexual stages.

Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), such as abuse, neglect or serious household problems, are linked to later difficulties with health and relationships, especially as they add up. What counts as an ACE, and how it affects people, differs across cultures, and supportive relationships can protect against these effects.