Week 9

I felt that this week, probably more than any other, helped to prepare me for a career in nursing. To really see the struggles of the elderly- from declining health, to losing loved ones and independence, to Alzheimer's and everything that it robs families of, to agism and how we view and the prejudices against the elderly, really opened my eyes. The film on Alzheimer's was especially moving, and made me hope that advances in medicine and technology are able to find a cure for it before I get to be elderly. The agony that those people endure, when your family member doesn't recognize you any more, is just heartbreaking. It almost seems worse than just losing your loved one- watching them suffer like that. I really have a soft spot for older people, and I'm excited to get my CNA and hopefully find employment in this field. Hard work for sure, but really important also.

Week 8

This week was hard for me. Reading and thinking about middle aged people and the changes that accompany them made me reflect so much on my parents. As midlife is this phase where you finally get to enjoy all that you have worked so hard for, I get sad thinking of everything they won't get to experience. My mom was only 36, and it's hitting me now how young that really is. I won't get to experience becoming friends with them now that I am grown. They won't meet  or know their grandchildren, and I won't be able to care for them as they get older. At the same time, it makes me look forward to having my own family and being able to not only survive what I've been through, but to find success within that context. I particularly enjoyed the article "Is there love after baby?" because having a baby is such a game changer for a relationship, and I'm unsure of how I would navigate this in my relationship. Its clear that having a baby will not, at least right away, bring you closer together.

Week 7, Adulthood

This week coincides with an important milestone in my life, turning 25.What a perfect week to read about the emergence of adulthood. I've been joking that I'm having a "quarter-life crisis", as I'm acutely aware of the fact that, at 25, I'm not a kid anymore. I'm much better able to take care of myself, yes, but I still don't "feel" like an adult, and I'm not sure if you ever really do. The ideas this week about adulthood in our country not being marked by one "rite of passage" and instead occurring at different ages depending on many factors, rings especially true. Reading about the changes that occur in thinking styles in adulthood, I feel like I am exactly where I need to be. It is interesting to be able to see your own development in this manner. I definitely use much more emotion within logic than I ever did, and the text really made me see how I had made this shift, without even realizing it. I see now why this class is required for so many of our programs. It has an incredible amount of information to help you understand both other people, as well as yourself.

Week 6, The Adolescent

Mark Twain once said:
 "The two most important days of your life are the day you are born, and the day you find out WHY".

One of the things that stuck with me this week was the ways in which an adolescent comes to identify what possible careers they are interested in, and begins to move toward those goals. I know that in my own experience, at least, that this process begins early and continually gets reformed as the adolescent both figures out their own skills and explores possible career paths. I know that my own path towards becoming a nurse began with first wanting to be an astronaut (at age 5), a veterinarian (at age 10), a teacher (at age 15), a mental health counselor (at age 20), and now a nurse, as I'm turning 25 this week. Sometimes I still feel stuck somewhere between specification and implementation, trying to best prepare myself for a career that will be both fitting to my personality and skills, as well as emotionally fulfilling to sustain me to retirement. This journey to find what I'm supposed to do feels like it has encompassed my entire life, and I know for certain that I wouldn't be seeking this career that I am so excited for, without those other steps along the way. Although the text discusses these topics within the framework of the adolescent mind, I feel that this career discovery journey continues well into adulthood, if not all of adulthood, as so many return to school later in life to pursue different career aspirations. I think of myself at age 18, and I know that there was no way that I knew myself well enough to say what it is that I wanted to do for the rest of my life. Just my ramblings, but a perfect topic to highlight some important things in my life right now.

Week 5 already!

Reading about the different styles of parenting was really helpful to me. Both in seeing how my own parents raised me (mostly authoritative, sometimes permissive), and in thinking about people and families that I know. I'm sure we all know the family whose parents seem to get walked on, and the children scream and cry until they get what they want. These parenting styles really affect not only how your own  child grows and develops, it also affects the family dynamic, and eventually to your children's children as they pass on the parenting style they grew up with and is what they know. The message for me is: what we do affects other people, and creates a ripple effect. If this class is all about the connections between us, I am really blown away by how intricate and dynamic those connections truly are. As a side note, I am also delighted to find out that being an only child does not set me up for failure in life, as some would have you believe! Until next week.

Week 4

This week's text has me reflecting on what is important in a school aged child's life, and what will set them up for success versus failure within the academic system. I'm so incredibly lucky to have been brought up in a family that values education. My mom made time every night for reading, and was often teaching me accelerated math and reading/writing at home. She really set that example for me. As a result, I found it exciting to learn and to prove myself academically, and that extends to this very day. . It's especially poignant for me to look back now that my mom is gone, at the gift of education that she instilled in me. Would I be going to school now, with the intent of becoming a nurse, if she had not? We know that genes are only half of the equation, and that intelligence is really created and expressed within a supportive and fostering home environment. I have friends that, while intelligent, were not brought up in an environment where going to college was important, much less expected like it was for me. I've just taken time to reflect this week, how lucky I've been. I wish that every kid had those chances. How different would the world be?

Week 3

I really connected with the course materials this week. In reviewing the article "What's the difference between girls and boys?", I reflected on my own experiences with gender and gender roles. I have an aunt, my dad's oldest sister, who I now know is transgendered. I'm fascinated by this, because I always just knew her as my Aunt Sharon. She would usually bring a girlfriend to our family functions (I never thought anything about it because it was normal to me. Some women have boyfriends, some have girlfriends), and at some point (as a child) I realized that she was what you would call "gay". My grandmother never knew that she was gay, because if she had, my aunt Sharon would have been disowned (They were strict Mormans, with a capital M). What a shame that my grandmother never knew who her child really was.

The past few years, she has asked us to start calling her by different names, first "Shay", then "Shane". I finally asked her this year, and she told me she is transgendered, that her brain was born a different gender than her body (how she explained it). And it all made perfect sense. She is the most masculine woman I've ever met. Her and my dad were really close, and I understand that now. She was more like an older brother to him than a sister. To connect to the course materials, I think that we are much more open these days to letting children be who they are (gender), regardless of what that means. We still have a long long ways to go, but hopefully as the stereotypical "gender roles" become more and more relaxed, people like her will find a greater degree of acceptance and understanding. I can only wish for her that it had been that way when she was a kid.

Week 2

Something that I was struck by this week is just how intricate and dynamic the forces of nature and nurture are in creating our temperaments. I am reminded of my own family when the book delves into adoption studies and differences between siblings. I have two cousins on my fathers side, siblings who share the same mother and father but not the same genetic makeup, as my oldest cousin Jenny is adopted. My younger cousin Erin is not. They could not be more different people, and I wonder how these genetic and familial forces have shaped the people that they are. Erin is over the top, loud, incredibly selfish, and never got over the divorce of her parents. She had her first child at 15, then another at 17. She is content to live at home with her mom and party while grandma stays home with the kids.

Jenny, on the other hand, is laid back, thoughtful, and attending school to become an MD. She is very independent and left home at 18 and never came back. She doesn't resent her parents for their divorce, and is determined to be a different kind of mother than her sister, when she's ready. Jenny has chosen not to know who her biological parents were. How much of her makeup comes from them is the unknown.  Did her genes influence the environment she was raised in? Did her parents have different expectations of her, being the oldest? Very interesting stuff.

Hello everyone!

This will be my blog for our BTC Lifespan Psychology class for winter 2012!

Feel free to comment on or message me about anything I post here. I've had some pretty unique experiences in my life and it's made me who I am today. I see myself as a student of life, and I'm sure this class will be totally fascinating.