Contexts of Positive Adult Development

Abstract

It is perhaps surprising that so much of the study of human development has been the study of normal progress and its derailment, with much less attention to flourishing. When it comes to infancy and childhood, the normative developmental achievements such as walking, talking, and taking another’s perspective strike us as just that—remarkable achievements. (I would nevertheless suggest that an emphasis on flourishing needs to be brought to bear on the study of early life, as the emerging field of positive education is richly illustrating.) But is normalcy and its disruption an adequate way to conceive development beyond childhood? Currently, efforts to bring a focus on flourishing to lifespan developmental psychology are most visible in the studies of adolescence and aging, the two periods that were traditionally viewed primarily through a pathology lens— sturm und drang (storm and stress) and delinquency on the one hand and disease and decline on the other. Development during the half century or more of life between adolescence and advanced old age, however, has continued to be viewed, until recent years, primarily in terms of normative roles and transitions, with greater emphasis on the management of strain and conflict than on flourishing. Meanwhile, despite important exceptions, much of the work in positive psychology on adult goals, purpose, meaning, and engagement and other topics central to an understanding of the life well lived has not tended to examine the topics from a developmental perspective. That is, researchers have not explored how phenomena are affected by, or specific to, a person’s place in the life course or how processes of gain, loss, and transformation can be understood through the lens of developmental theory. This chapter will first present some general observations about positive psychology. These provide the rationale and framework for a discussion of the constructive role of context in adult development, which I illustrate with the case of mentoring during professional training and the early career.

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