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personal and social hazards of early adult hood
The major social and personal hazards of early adulthood stem from a failure to master some or most of the important development tasks for that age, making the individual seem immature as compared with other young adults. Up to age of thirty, it is quite common for both men and women to be immature in certain areas of their behavior, while at the same time showing marked maturity in others. Gradually, with new achievements and new expectations from the social group, much of the immaturity that characterized behavior in the early part of this period disappears, resulting in a more even development on a more mature level.
Mastering developmental tasks is difficult at any age ,and this difficulty is increased when stumbling blocks hinder the individuals progress. The most common stumbling blocks to the mastering of the developmental task of early adulthood are
-prolongation of peer group influence
The more unfinished business, in the form of unmastered earlier developmental task, the individual carriers into adulthood, the longer and harder the adjustments to adulthood will be.
Poor health or physical defects that prevent the individual from doing what others of similar age can do make mastering of the developmental task of adulthood difficult or impossible.
When training received at home or in school has little or no relationship to the pattern of life in adulthood, the individual will be ill prepared to meet the demands of adult life.
The adult who was overprotected during childhood and adolescent may find adjustment to adult life extremely difficult. Many parents continue to overprotect their adults sons and daughters thus adding to their adjustment difficulties.
-Prolongation of peer group influence
The longer young adults continue their education in college or training schools, the longer peer group influences will prevail and the longer their behavior will conform to peer groups standards and values. Because they have become accustomed to behaving as adolescents, leaving to behave as adult is more difficult than it otherwise would be.
Adults who were extremely successful academically, socially, and athletically in high school or college are likely to develop unrealistic concepts of their abilities. As a result, they expect to the equally successful in the adult world. Parental aspiration during adolescents often add to the adjustment problems of adult hood.
Failure to master developmental tasks of early adulthood, resulting in a failure to come up to social expectations in different areas of behavior, affects the individuals personal and social adjustments. For example, the young adult who clings to youthful interests and fails to develop more mature ones is judged by others as immature, leading to feelings of unhappiness. Similarly much of the discontent experienced by young adult is due to the fact that they have fewer material possessions than their friends and neighbours have -an attitude that is a carry-over from adolescence.
Some of the most common and most serious hazards to personal and social adjustments during the early adult years are briefly discussed below. While all adults will not necessarily experience all of these hazards, most of them are experienced at one time or another by a majority of young adults.
Religious hazards in early adult hood.
There are two hazards in the area of religion that cause emotional disturbances for many young adults. The first relates to adjusting to a new religious faith accepted in place of the family faith of childhood. Some young adults accept a new faith because it seem to have more in common with their personal interests and beliefs than their family religion had. Others accept a new faith when they marry to please their spouses or their spouses family. What ever the reason for accepting a new faith, there is likely to be a conflict with the childhood faith and a problem of adjusting to the ritual associated with the new faith.
The second and more difficult problem related to religion in early adulthood across in mixed marriages when in -laws pressure the couple to adopt one or the other faith. Even when young adults have little interests in religion, they object to having the religious training of their children dictated by grand parents on either side, and they resent the implications that their religions are inferior to those of their mates- an implication inherent in the insistence that the change be made.
Furthermore, when faced with this problem, young adults have to content with the pressures from their own parents, to whom adherence to the family faith may also be important. Adjustment problems in religions frequently complicate marital adjustments and are often at the basis of "in-law" problems-one of the most difficult problems in the area of marital adjustments.
Social hazards
Many young adults find hazards in their adjustments to the social group with which they are no identified. Three of these hazards are especially common and difficult to overcome successfully.
First, young adults find it difficult to become associated with a congenial social group - one of the important developmental tasks of early adulthood. There are several condition responsible for this difficulty. Women who are tied down by home responsibilities may have neither the time nor the money for the social activities they formerly enjoyed and may be unable to find satisfactory substitutes. This results in discontentment which often affects their marital satisfaction. Men like wise, because of pressure from work and home responsibilities, often find it difficult to become associated with a congenial social group. Like women, they then experience discontent with their lives. Even when they have the time and money for social activities, some adults find it difficult to establish warm, friendly relationship with the people with whom they come in contact. This may be due to lack of congeniality, resulting from differences in the interests and values, but more often it is due to the competitive spirit many young adults develop in their hopes of climbing the vocational ladder-a spirit which becomes habitual and carries over into their social relation ship. That is one of the reasons why, as both irikson and havighurst have explained, early adulthood is one of the loneliest periods in the life span.
The second hazard to good adjustment and satisfaction with social life is dissatisfaction with the role the social group expects the individual to play. Adults who were accustomed to playing leadership roles in adolescence now find it difficult to play the role of follower, should circumstance require this. A man who was a leader in his school or college days is likely to become frustrated, as an adult, when leadership roles in business, industry, or community affairs go to men who have a higher socioeconomic status or greater prestige in the community.
The third hazard to social adjustment is social mobility. Socially mobile people face far more dilemmas than the relatively immobile because they must adjust to new social groups with new values, and standards of behavior. Families that are upwardly socially mobile, for example, move to better neighborhoods, give up old associations and values, choose between associations with members of two classes, join new social organizations, and give up most of the social life they enjoyed with former neighbors. This increases the loneliness that is characteristic of early adulthood and often leads to depression.
Equally serious, social mobility often causes stress-in the family, not only between husband and wife but between parents and children as well. The husband is often critical of his wife if he feels that she is not presenting a favorable image to the new neghbours. Also, parents overly anxious to have their children associate with the "better" group in their new neighbourhood may become aggressive and punitive in their treatment of them.
Individuals who are forced to move downward in the social hierarchy find that they have little in common with the members of the social class with which they are now identified. As a result, they tend to isolate themselves. Also, their former friends and neighbours are likely to drop them because they no longer live in the same neighbourhood or cannot afford the social activities they formerly engaged in.
Sex role Hazards of early adult hood
Because of the conflict concerning approved sex roles today, adherence to either traditional or egalitarian concepts presents hazards. Adherence to traditional concepts of sex roles has a marked influence on a young adults personal adjustments. For example, a man may go to any length to prove to himself and others that he is typically masculine. He may over tax his strength, disregarding danger signals of poor health, in the belief that it is unmasculine to worry about ones health, or he may devalue feminine characteristics to the point where he tries constantly to assert his superiority in his relationship with women.
Women as a result of being looked down upon and treated as inferior to men, often develop a typical "minority-group complex"- an emotionally toned belief in their inferiority, not unlike that experienced by members of minority, religions, or ethnic groups. In addition, they are often conditioned to be afraid of success, especially in any activity in which men are involved because success, they believe, would suggest that they were unfeminine. As Midgley and Abrams have said, "social constraints and social definition of sex -appropriate behavior have had crippling effects on achievement motivation in women". This is less likely to be true in activities in which only members of the female sex are involved, though many women develop the habit of under achievement as a result of fear of success in activities in which they compete with men.
Married women often feel 'trapped' in a situation they had not anticipated and from which they see little hope of escape. If a wife and mother finds that those for whom she has sacrificed her personal interests do not appreciate her efforts; if she finds the work she must do dull, lonely, confining, and below her abilities and training; and if she finds the romance she had associated with the role of a married women lacking, she becomes disillusioned and resentful. For many women ,the role of "only a housewife" leads to disillusionment and resentment.
This unfavorable attitudes is exaggerated by the "lazy-husband syndrome." The wife feels resentful when she sees her husband taking it easy and enjoying himself while she works more or less continuously from morning to night, seven days a week. The lazy husband syndrome has been described this way " The picture is one of a husband who has had a 'long' eight-hour day at his air-conditioned office and who comes home, calls for a drink, plops exhausted into a chair with the newspaper or in front of the television set, gets up to eat his dinner an hour later, complains that the meat is not well done, pecks his wife on the cheek and goes out with the bowling team, has a beer, comes home watches some more television, and plops into bed. Mean while, his wife, who has been working all day gets, the meal, tries to discipline the children so daddy can rest, feeds the infant, serves the meal, does the dishes, feeds the dog, bathes the kids, puts them to bed, puts a load of washing through, does some ironing, watches T.V.for an hour (while darning)...... this goes on day after day. The husband is happy but the women becomes vaguely unhappy, tense and fatigued.
When married women work outside the home, they not only experience a work overload but they usually find that their husbands careers take precedence over theirs if any occupational, conflict arises or if there are occupational demands in the husbands career that might interfere with the wife's career, such as moving to another community. Because many employers expect women to adjust their work to family needs, they tend to restrict them to less important jobs with poorer pay and fewer opportunities for advancement. This often has a injurious effect on marriage because of the bitternesses women feel about their work overload and discrimination against them.
Even unmarried women who do not have to divide their time and energies between family and career and who do not suffer from the feeling of being trapped, often find barriers to advancement in their chosen fields of work. They find that men, frequently less able than they, often receive larger salaries and are given positions with greater prestige and responsibility, mainly because the policy of the organization for which they work favors men. They also discover that prejudicial bias in the evaluation of women's work tends to result in barriers to achievement and advancement.
In conclusion, it is obvious that the most important hazard to good personal and social adjustments comes from the effects of sex-role stereotypes that influence the attitudes and behavior of both men and women. While any sex-role stereotype may prove to be a barrier to good adjustments, the traditional stereotypes are by far the most hazardous in today's American culture
Middle age is generally considered to extent from age 40 to age 60.The onset is marked by physical and mental changes, as is the end. At sixty, there is usually a decline in physical vigor, often accompanied by a lessening of mental alertness.
Personal and social hazards of middle age
The major personal and social hazards of middle age stem from the tendency of many men and women to accept the cultural stereotype of the middle-aged person as fat, forty, and balding. Because of a lack of scientific information about middle age, cultural, stereotype and many traditional beliefs have persisted. They can have serious effects on the attitudes of middle aged persons and members of the social group toward them.
However, while serious to good personal and social adjustment is adoption of cultural stereotypes and traditional beliefs, they are by no means the only hazards. Some of the important personal and social hazards that make adjustment especially difficult for middle aged people in the American culture of today are discussed below.
Personal Hazards
There are a number of personal hazards middle aged people encounter in their adjustments to their new roles and new life styles. Of this, six are especially common and serious. They are
-Acceptance of traditional beliefs
Acceptance of traditional beliefs
Acceptance of traditional beliefs about middle age has a profound influence on attitudes toward the physical changes that come with advancing age. The menopause, for example, is often referred to as a "critical' period, and this can heighten a women's dread of it. As parker has said " this carries the implication of danger-that women is on the brink of disaster, that her health, her happiness, and her very life is in jeopardy. It further implies that this is not merely a time of crisis that can be met forthwith and dissolved, but rather years when she must feel her way along a narrow ledge safety, at any movement of which by one false step she might fall into the abyss of a mental breakdown or serious physical illness.
Because hair on the head, face, body, arms, and legs is traditionally associated with virility in men, the thinning of the hair in middle age is likely to be a source of great concern to them. Even the beginning of baldness disturbs them because they believe that it is indicative of a decline in their sexual powers. In reality, anxiety about virility is one of the chief causes of such decline, and the balding middle aged man who worries about his sexual powers merely accelerates the rate of their decline.
Many middle-aged people, particularly men, are in constant rebellion against the restrictions age places on their usual patterns of behavior. A man may refuse to adhere to a diet his doctor prescribes or to restrict his activities for the sake of his health. Like the pubescent child, the middle aged man rebels against restrictions on behavior, but for a different reason. Rebellion stems from a recognition of the value that society attaches to youth and thus he is rebelling against restrictions that mean he is growing old. This may bring on middle aged ailments of minor or major seriousness. As steincrohn has pointed out " if you relax more often, if you slow up, don't believe that you will grow old prematurely. The grim reaper won't swish his scythe at you and cut you off long before you reach the 70s and 80s.On the contrary, the reaper seems to have patience for the relaxer's and is impatient with the over doers.
Women who make the poorest adjustments to middle age are those who have attached a great deal of importance to a youthful appearance and masculine admiration. When they are forced to recognize that they are no longer as attractive as they once were and that they cannot attract and hold masculine attention, they may openly rebel against middle-age.
When adjustment to middle-aged is poor, as shown by constant rebellion against the physical changes that inevitably come with aging, interest in clothing is intensified. Men and women concentrate mainly on selecting clothes which will make them look younger than they are. Bright colors, extreme styles, and a large wardrobe become as important to the middle aged man or women who is trying to defy age as they are to the adolescent.
Rebellion against middle-aged is often heightened by magazine articles, television advertisements, and so on, that stress what the middle-aged person can and should do to camouflage the telltale signs of aging. Ryan, however, has suggested that these changes in appearance are not necessarily unattractive. According to her " some of this changes may make the individual more, rather than less, attractive. Often the first and most obvious change is in the color of the hair which usually turns to gray and then to white. This frequently is a positive factor: Many people are more attractive with white hair. Also, as individuals grow older, the face become more lined and wrinkled. This, again, is not necessarily a treatment. These lines may give a pleasing character to a face which was bland and uninteresting with the smoothness of youth.
Changing roles is never easy, especially after one has played certain prescribed roles over a period of time and has learned to derive satisfaction from them. Further more, too much success in one role is likely to lead to rigidity and may make adjustment to another role difficult.
Also, a person who has played a narrow range of roles is likely to be less flexible than one who has played a wider range and has learned to derive satisfaction from different roles. The person who has played many roles finds it easier to shift to a new one. To make a good adjustment to new roles, the individual must, as Havighurst has explained, "withdraw emotional capital from one role and invest it in another one."
A serious hazard to good personal adjustment in middle age comes from the necessity for changing interests as physical strength and endurance decrease and as health deteriorates. Unless middle aged men and women can develop new interest to replace those they must give up, or unless they have developed enough interests in their earlier years to be able to abandon some of them without feeling their loss too seriously, they are likely to become bored and wonder how they can spend their leisure time.
Like adolescents who become bored when they have too few interests and activities to fill their time, middle-aged people both men and women are likely to try to" stir up some excitement" Usually they do this by seeking out extramarital relationships. While these may be temporarily satisfying ,they are likely to lead to feeling s of guilt and shame, to anxiety about being " caught" and to serious problems with spouse and other family members if they are discovered.
Women's increased interest in status symbol, which is common characteristic , can be a hazard to good personal and social adjustments if families cannot afford the status symbol they want. In such cases ,there are three common reactions on the part of women who craves these symbols. First, they may complain and nag their husband for not providing the money for these symbols, second they may overspend and plunge the family into debts; or third ,they may go to work to earn the money themselves. All of these patterns of response to craving for status symbols tend to lead to frictional relationships with spouses, especially the third pattern, which many men feel reflects unfavorably on their ability to provide for their families.
Middle aged people who have unrealistic aspirations concerning their achievement - often carried over from adolescence-face a serious hazard to good personal adjustments when they realize that they have fallen short of their goals and that time is fast running out.
While this hazard is more likely to have a direct effect on men than women, women are indirectly affected when their husband fail to achieve the financial and vocational success they have expected. Even though women who work tend to have more realistic aspiration than men, they may also realize that they have not reached their goals and time is running short.
Failure to reach any goal can lead to feelings of inferiority and inadequacy, feeling that tend to become generalized and result in a failure complex. People who develop such complexes have defeatist attitude toward everything they undertake. As a result, their achievements fall even further below their aspiration.
Social hazard
Social adjustment in middle age are less affected by traditional beliefs and stereotypes than personal adjustments. However, social adjustments are affected to some extent by traditional beliefs such as "you cant teach old dog new tricks"-the "new trick" being new social skill- or "once a leader always a leader". For example middle aged men and women who were not leaders in school or college may feel that they now have no hope of achieving leadership roles in either the vocational or social worlds.
Making poor social adjustments in middle age is hazardous because, with advancing age, most men and women must rely more and more on the companionship of outsiders, as their spouses become ill or die and as their grown children become increasingly preoccupied with their own lives. Middle-aged person s who do not master the important developmental task of achieving adult civic and social responsibility are likely to be lonely and unhappy in their old age and may find that it is too late then to make good social adjustments.
Old age or senescence (60yr to death)
Hazards to personal and social adjustments in old age
At few times during the life span are there more potentially serious hazards to good personal and social adjustment than there are in old age. This is due partly to the physical and mental decline that makes the elderly more vulnerable to potential hazards than they were earlier, and partly to lack of recognition of these potential hazards on the part of the social group. The result is that few attempts are made to warn the elderly or to prepare them for these hazards as they grow older.
For example, elderly people are seldom prepared for the hazard of accidents, which are so common in old age, nor are they taught how to avoid them. Similarly, few are given help in learning how to use their increased amount of leisure time in ways that are compatible with their declining strength and energy and their decreased incomes.
During the past decade also doctors have become increasingly active in their campaign to encourage middle-aged or even younger patients to take off weight in order to avoid the potential danger of heart trouble as they grow older. Unfortunately, many middle-aged people fail to follow such advice or even to recognize that they may avoid trouble in the future if they change their pattern of living gradually, rather than having to change it abruptly and radically later on, when it may be too late to repair the damage done earlier.
Just as their is no conclusive evidence that preparation for retirement always guarantees good adjustment to it, so there is no justification for believing that preparation for old age will always lead to good personal and social adjustments during this period. However, there is ample evidence that the person who is prepared for the personal and social changes that take place during old age is better able to adjust to them than one who has received no such preparation.
In the following of the psychological hazards of old age, it should be apparent how important a role preparation can play and how greatly increased the hazards are when preparation is minimized or completely absent.
Psychological hazards
There are also a number of psychological hazards characteristic of old age. While this may occur at other ages, as is true of the physical hazards, psychological hazards are not only more likely to occur during old age than during the younger years of the life span but their impact on personal and social adjustments is greater.
Of the many psychological hazards characteristic of old age, the following are the most common and the most serious
-Acceptance of cultural stereotypes of the elderly
-Affects of physical changes of aging
-Feeling of guilt about idleness
Acceptance of cultural stereotypes of the elderly
The first psychological hazard is acceptance of the traditional beliefs and cultural stereotypes of the aged. This is hazardous because it encourages the elderly to feel inadequate and inferior. Even worse, it tends to stifle their motivation to do what they are capable of doing.
For example, elderly people who believe that they are too old to learn new skills, because "you cannot teach an old dog new tricks" will be at a disadvantage if they seek full or part-time employment after retirement, or if they are encouraged to pursue a new hobby to fill their leisure time. If the elderly accept the traditional belief that all old people should withdraw from life, their health will be impaired because of lack of exercise. Similarly reminiscing or "living in the past" is a trait that bores other people and sets up roadblocks to good social adjustments.
While both men and women are influenced by the cultural beliefs and stereotypes of aging, women tends to be more affected than men. This is because the social group judges elderly women in a negative way as physically unattractive, usually in poor health, and financially strapped as a result of widowhood. This negative stereotypes of elderly women affects their personal and social attitudes and in turn their personal and social adjustments.
Effects of physical changes in aging
The second psychological hazard of old age stems from feeling of inferiority and inadequacy that comes with physical changes. The loss of an attractive, sex appropriate appearance may lead both men and women to feel rejection by the social group.
Loss of hearing interferes with communication with other people. In addition, many older people have difficulty in speaking because of missing teeth or poorly fitted dentures. This proves to be a barrier to communication and to social relationships.
The necessity for establishing a different, more appropriate pattern of life is third psychological hazard many elderly people face. They may, for example, no longer need as large a home now that their children are grown and have homes of their own. However, many older people cling to their homes and possessions and to the life styles associated with them. Streib has explained why giving up homes and cherished possessions is so traumatic to many older people "part of our depression at the loss of possession is due to our feeling that we must now go without certain goods that we expected the possession to bring in their train. Yet in every case there remains, over and above this, a sense of shrinkage of our personality, a partial conversion of ourselves to nothingness, which is psychological phenomenon by itself"
The fourth psychological hazard is suspicion or realization that mental decline has started to set in. Many elderly people suspect or realize that they are becoming some what forgetful, that they have difficulty learning new names or facts, and that they cannot hold up under pressure as well as they used to. They may come to think that they are slipping mentally, and this encourages them in their belief that they are too old to learn anything new. Instead of adjusting their activities to conform to their mental state, they withdraw from all activities that might involve competition with younger people, and thus they experience all the problems ,described earlier, that social disengagement brings
Feeling of guilt about idleness
The fifth psychological hazard is guilt about not working while other people still are. Many older people of today, who grew up in a more work-oriented society, feel guilty after retirement or after their home responsibilities have diminished. They want to do something useful but may shy away from community activities planned for older citizens because they regard them as "make-work" or forms of recreation rather than real work. This they do even when they want the companionship these activities will provide.
Because most elderly people need to feel useful if they are to be happy and well adjusted, attempts are made to get them interested in doing volunteer work in their communities. Volunteer work, it is claimed, is a suitable substitute for the retired person's former occupation because it presents a personal challenge for the individual, thus generating self-respect, while at the same time winning social approval and esteem.
Elderly men, on the whole, tend to be less willing to engage in volunteer, community work than women. This is partly because they have become accustomed to being paid for their service and thus resist "working" for nothing and partly because they associate volunteer work with the feminine role. The cultural stereotype of the volunteer as a dilettante who paddles in this work to kill time has a strong influence on the attitudes of those who lived a work-oriented life and whose shun any substitute that does not confirm to their earlier values.
The sixth psychological hazard is the result of reduced income. After retirement, many elderly people are unable to afford the leisure-time activities they consider worthwhile, such as attending lectures or concerts or participating in various community activities. If they must rely upon television for entertainment, they often find that the majority of the programs are youth-or young-adult oriented. As such, they offer little of interest to the elderly.
Women, even more than men, find a reduced income a hazard to their personal and social adjustments. It is especially serious during widowhood if the husbands former pensions end with their deaths.
The seventh and by far the most serious psychological hazard in old age is social disengagement. As was explained earlier, this may be voluntary, but far more often it is involuntary-due to poor health, limited financial resource, or other conditions of which the elderly have little or no control.
Perhaps the best way to emphasize the hazardous nature of social disengagement is to point out the benefits that social belonging and participation in social activities bring to the elderly. Studies of members in different types of voluntary associations or in senior citizen centers have revealed that active participation in these groups contributes greatly to psychological well-being as shown in an increase in life satisfaction.
Some elderly people gain adequate satisfaction from social contacts with family members and relatives and, consequently, do not experience the ill effects of social disengagement. Some substitute indirect social contacts, as through telephone conversations, for direct, face-to-face social interactions but they are rarely as satisfying as direct interactions.
Because social contacts are especially important for women after their husbands retire or die, social disengagement becomes serious hazard to personal and social adjustments. The elderly who are disengaged, either voluntary or involuntary ,become socially isolated. As a result they lack the social support they had in times of trouble or stress when they were younger. This is especially serious if they are widowed or have few family members to turn to with their problems.