part 2

Adolescence

Having more freedom than children but less than adults, adolescents constantly tempted to question or test the authority of parents and teachers. Segregated from other age groups in high schools, they tend to form their own subculture, with norms, values and attitudes that may differ significantly from those of the society that surrounds them.

Mature Adulthood

Old Age

Death

The Life Course

Now without maternal responsibilities, and perhaps feeling that she has in some sense wasted a part of her life, a wife may strike out for a fresh career, a new independence, only to find these causes more problems with a husband whose self-confidence is faltering. Yet the “crisis” is by no means inevitable, and even if it occurs, it can usually be overcome. For the many people who have successfully negotiated the life course up to this point, these years are among the most comfortable and satisfying of their lives (Levinson, 1978; Gould, 1978; Rubin, 1979; Perlin, 1980).

At this stage, primary socialization is virtually completed, and the individual has developed a core identity that is henceforth unlikely to be radically modified (except under such extreme conditions as resocialization in prison, mental hospital, or religious cult). For the most part, socialization is now of the developmental kind, building on the fairly stable foundations of prior experience.

Adolescence is an ambiguous and often confusing period, marked by vaguely defined rights and responsibilities. Anywhere in any industrial part of the world, the socialization process equips people poorly for challenges of adolescence, for teenagers are constantly confronted with contradictory demands and pressures.

People began to play adult economic and social roles as soon as they were physically able to do so, and children of five or six would work in a field as long as any adult. Child labor was not considered as a scandal; there can be no concept of children’s rights without a concept of childhood. Even in industrial societies, children continued to perform adult economic roles.

Advanced industrialized societies, on the other hand, tend to be very child centered. Children are socialized quite differently from adults; they have distinctive forms of dress and their own separate spheres of activity, ranging from children’s TV and games to kindergarten and elementary schools.

The burden of the years affects everyone:signs of baldness, wrinkling, and stiffness in the limbs all announce the gradual degeneration of the body that comes with advanced age. Of course, different people age physically at very different rates; but ill-health becomes steadily more common until more than three quarters of those aged sixty-five or over suffer from chronic health condition. Yet the infirmity of some of the aged can have social as well as physical causes: if we offer the very old role of an infirm person who has lived any real usefulness to society, we must not be surprised that some of the elderly live up to these social expectations.

We also effectively exclude the dying from the on-going life of the community. We have sanitized death and removed it as far as possible from everyday experience by ensuring that most people die in nursing homes, hospitals, and similar formal organizations that care for the sick and aged. Typically, therefore, the dying face, their end in bureaucratic environment, surrounded by other sick people and a professional staff, rather than in the intimacy of their homes with their

Childhood

In the preindustrial societies, deaths usually took place at home in the contest of the family, and young people grew up with a close understanding of the experience. In some modern worlds like North America, Britain, and other European countries, however, death is very much a taboo subject: they speak of it in hushed tones and use such euphemisms as “passed away”. As children, we fear the subject; as adults we avoid it---even, and sometimes especially, when we are in the presence of someone who is dying.

Childhood seems a “natural” part of the life course to us, yet the very concept of childhood is a comparatively recent one: preindustrial societies typically did not recognize it as a separate stage of life. Instead, the young passed directly from a prolonged infancy into their adult roles.

The human life course seems at first sight to be purely a matter of biology. But the sequence if birth, childhood, maturity, old age, and death is also a social one, for its length, stages, challenges, and opportunities depend very much on the society in which one lives. How long we live, for example, is strongly influenced by social as well as biological factors.