Abstract
One of the dilemmas confronted by professors teaching courses on human development is how to convey an appreciation for the broad range of human experience, and its effect on development, to students whose own life experiences are limited. Stephanie Wright, an associate professor of psychology at Georgia Gwinnett College, has taken on that challenge by creating a supplement designed to be used with human development textbooks that delves deeply into 12 comprehensive and varied case studies. The main audience for Case Studies in Lifespan Development will be professors and students of human development across the lifespan looking to supplement their understanding of course concepts. Although it may be used to complement any number of core textbooks, it is specifically designed to integrate seamlessly with either Tara Kuther’s (2019) Lifespan Development: Lives in Context (2nd ed.) or Laura Levine and Joyce Munsch’s (2019) Child Development From Infancy to Adolescence (2nd ed.). Both texts and their associated instructor’s manuals include discussion questions that work with the 12 case studies, though students of gerontology are more likely to use the former text.
Each case study of about 20 to 25 pages gives context to developmental concepts by covering the broad expanse of a single life story from conception, including details such as the parents’ age, health, socioeconomic status, and insurance coverage during the prenatal period, to death. Professor Wright’s own scholarship is focused on at-risk children and adolescents, and those developmental periods in each case study are the most detailed, occasionally at the expense of a more nuanced examination of growth and development in later years. Six of the developmental periods covered in each case study (prenatal/newborn, infancy/toddlerhood, early, middle, and late childhood, and adolescence) occur before the case subject reaches adulthood and take up most of each case study. The four remaining developmental periods, which address early, middle, and late adulthood and experiences with death and dying, are shorter. At each stage, socioemotional, physical, and cognitive development are explored.
Case studies included in the paperback text include only the optimal case, with factors that lead to positive outcomes for each individual. In the optimal case, and regardless of their challenges, all individuals prevail, have satisfying careers, and lead relatively happy, long lives, traceable in part to the foundational experiences enumerated earlier in the case study. An innovative and very effective feature of the book is the addition of the digital-only appendix, which includes two alternate cases for each case study: one with a “moderate” outcome and one with an “undesirable” outcome for each person. By tweaking aspects of a person’s early life experience, the alternate cases allow the reader and student to trace the potential effects of both purposeful and random changes in a person’s life story. There are two additional appendices useful for both students and teachers. One is a “domain mapping,” which points the reader to the portion of each case study that illustrates a particular aspect of development. The second is the online “Student Research Kit,” which summarizes the major schools of thought on the biological (e.g., Freud), cognitive (e.g., Piaget), and socioemotional (e.g., Erikson) domains of lifespan development.
The author does a good job of including tremendous diversity in only 12 case studies. Although all are American, the subjects differ in the background and demographic categories one would expect: race and ethnicity (including biracial subjects), gender (though none are transgender), sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, birth order and siblings, and family characteristics such as mental and physical health of parents and other relatives, and including subjects with single, gay, undocumented, or adoptive parents. Life experiences and choices of the case subjects themselves also differ widely: in education, sexual development, friendships, health and physical limitations, athletic and artistic endeavors, career choices and retirement, marriage/divorce/widowhood, children/stepchildren/grandchildren, traumatic experiences, and loss and bereavement. Two cases include religion (Jewish or Muslim) as important to development.
One slightly surprising feature of the case studies is the author’s choice to have entire lifespans occur in roughly the present-day contemporary climate. For example, two of the case subjects who lived into their 70s or 80s were born to married gay parents, though there were no married gay couples more than 70 years ago. Another subject who died at nearly 80 lost her husband at a young age—in the current war in Syria and Afghanistan. The author does acknowledge the choice and uses a case discussion question to explore whether the life might be different if the person had been born in an earlier or later period. Although having entire lives occur under relatively current conditions may be beneficial to students of early childhood and adolescent development, for gerontologists there is a lost opportunity to consider today’s older adults as people who may have grown up with actual past and developmentally informative experiences such as the Depression, World War II or the Vietnam War, the Civil Rights struggle, or a world in which gay parents were unable to marry.
A more in-depth look at one case study may illustrate the richness of detail and variations in life trajectory under the optimal, moderate, and undesirable scenarios for one person. The author created the delightfully named Poppy, and her equally whimsically named siblings Clover and Leaf, as a family with confused parentage and resulting strained relationships. Poppy was conceived through her mother’s affair with her legal father’s best friend, making Clover and Leaf her older half-siblings. The couple remained married for a while and by mutual agreement both fathers were heavily involved in Poppy’s upbringing. However, Clover and Leaf grew jealous of the attention Poppy received from her “extra daddy,” and blamed her for their father’s frequent absence and their parents’ eventual divorce. Since neither sibling wanted to live with her, she moved in with her biological dad but still got along with her legal dad, who is a teacher at her private school. In the optimal case she secretly applied and was admitted to many prestigious universities though no parent knew she was interested. To avoid conflict over tuition responsibility, she left her family, went to all-expenses-paid West Point, became career military, and married a fellow soldier. Her husband died tragically during a missile strike in the Syrian war, before they ever lived together. She continued her military career, became heavily involved with a school for girls in Afghanistan, and adopted an orphaned Afghani boy. After her military stint, she worked for the Department of Defense and raised her son in the United States, making tentative peace with her sister and parents. In her later years, she began attending mosque with her son, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren, and died at 79.
In the “moderate” case, Poppy’s bio-dad had limited court-ordered visitation rights, her legal dad ignored her, displayed frequent temper tantrums, and froze out all three children. The three adults argued frequently over who should live with whom and who should pay college tuition, and she lost a boyfriend over her strange parental arrangement. She still chose West Point, but married a superior officer (a roommate suggests she has “daddy issues”), and had frequent debilitating migraines. She died in her mid-60s. In the “undesirable” case, there was even more discord among the three parents, even less visitation allowed to her bio-dad, and Poppy was too afraid of her legal father to enter his classroom at her school. The family no longer gathered for holidays as they used to. A classmate spread rumors about her family situation and she became a pariah in high school. She still entered West Point and joined the military, but was killed in action at age 28 in Afghanistan.
Other cases follow a similar pattern. Without drawing direct cause-and-effect relationships in each trio of cases, the author successfully leads the reader to view a life story and its variations as a developmental continuum, with early experiences and choices at least influencing later outcomes. The practice and case discussion questions in each chapter and the informative appendices also assist the student in exploring these connections both within the same subject’s three trajectories and among the 12 subjects. By incorporating developmental theory into alternative outcomes for many diverse case studies, the book becomes a creative, practical, and welcome resource for students and teachers of human development.