Contextual Influences on Development

What is meant by the word “context”? It means that we are influenced by when and where we live. Our actions, beliefs, and values are a response to the circumstances surrounding us. Sternberg describes contextual intelligence as the ability to understand what is called for in a situation (Sternberg, 1996). The key here is to understand that behaviors, motivations, emotions, and choices are all part of a bigger picture. Our concerns are such because of who we are socially, where we live, and when we live; they are part of a social climate and set of realities that surround us. Important social factors include cohort, social class, gender, race, ethnicity, and age. Let’s begin by exploring two of these: cohort and social class.

Cohort

A cohort is a group of people who are born at roughly the same time period in a particular society. Cohorts share histories and contexts for living. Members of a cohort have experienced the same historical events and cultural climates which have an impact on the values, priorities, and goals that may guide their lives. Consider the differences in experiences of someone from the ‘Silent’ generation that lived with constant scarcity and rationing during WWII versus the economic prosperity that followed for the ‘Baby Boomer’ generation and how those historical contexts influence their development.

Socioeconomic Status

Another context that affects our lives is our social standing, socioeconomic status, or social class. Socioeconomic status is a way to identify families and households based on their shared levels of education, income, and occupation. While there is certainly individual variation, members of a social class tend to share similar lifestyles, patterns of consumption, parenting styles, stressors, religious preferences, and other aspects of daily life. We also find differences between social classes in these and other areas of development. Often, those in low socioeconomic groups, people living in poverty, are disadvantaged, lack of opportunities, and have different life experiences than those with more financial stability and wealth.

Poverty describes the state of not having access to material resources, wealth, or income, and also includes the lack of opportunity to improve one’s standard of living and acquire resources. Life chances is a term used to describe someone’s access to marketplace resources—essentially, how likely it is in their environment that they might be able to find employment or have a social safety net. Someone who is living in poverty but has high life chances may be able to improve their economic standing, but someone with low life chances will likely have a consistently low standard of living. The term for a person’s ability to change their economic status in a society is known as social mobility.

When families have low social mobility, they may become trapped in poverty for generations; we refer to this as the cycle of poverty. Typically, these families have either limited or nonexistent social and economic resources. There are many disadvantages that collectively work in a circular process to make it virtually impossible for individuals to break the cycle of poverty. They are less likely to have financial capital, education, job skills, reliable transportation, and social capital (connections to people with specialized knowledge or in power). Without these resources, poverty-stricken individuals experience disadvantages that, in turn, increase their poverty.

Additionally, those living in poverty suffer disproportionately from hunger, poor nutrition, and exhibit disproportionately high rates of physical and mental health issues. These illnesses can be disabling, preventing people in poverty from working, thus reducing one’s opportunities to improve their social and economic status.

Finally, poverty increases the risk of homelessness. People who are homeless have low access to neighborhood resources, high-status social contacts, or basic services such as a phone line, limiting their ability to improve their economic position, again perpetuating poverty.

Resiliency

Just as important as research on adversity is the study of resilience. To date, such research reveals that, no matter the adversity, there is always room for recuperation, gains, and work-arounds to foster improvement in mental and physical functioning. For example, a recent framework, called “HOPE: Health Outcomes from Positive Experiences” focuses on four broad categories of experiences that can buffer the effects early adversity and contribute to healthy development and wellbeing: (1) nurturing, supportive relationships; (2) living, developing, playing, and learning in safe, stable, protective, and equitable environments; (3) having opportunities for constructive social engagement and connectedness; and (4) learning social and emotional competencies (Sege & Browne, 2017). In fact, the same brain characteristics that contribute to early vulnerability (i.e., malleability, meaning that the brain’s development is open to the effects of adverse experiences) also contribute to later resilience. Such “neuroplasticity” means that the developing brain can also be reshaped by subsequent positive experiences, in this case, enriching and healing social, physical, and psychological experiences. Continued exploration of the most effective components of treatment, and whether they are age-graded, is an important topic of study in this area.

Culture

Culture is often referred to as a blueprint or guideline shared by a group of people that specifies how to live. It includes ideas about what is right and wrong, what to strive for, what to eat, how to speak, what is valued, as well as what kinds of emotions are called for in certain situations. Culture teaches us how to live in a society and allows us to advance because each new generation can benefit from the solutions found and passed down from previous generations.

Culture is learned from parents, schools, churches, media, friends, and others throughout a lifetime. The kinds of traditions and values that evolve in a particular culture serve to help members function in their society and to value their society. We tend to believe that our own culture’s practices and expectations are the right ones. This belief that our own culture is superior is called ethnocentrism and is a normal by-product of growing up in a culture. It becomes a roadblock, however, when it inhibits understanding of cultural practices from other societies. Cultural relativity is an appreciation for cultural differences and the understanding that cultural practices are best understood from the standpoint of that particular culture.

Culture is a crucial context for human development, and understanding development requires being able to identify which features of development are culturally based. This understanding is somewhat new and still being explored. So much of what developmental theorists have described in the past has been culturally bound and difficult to apply to various cultural contexts. For example, Erikson’s theory that teenagers struggle with identity assumes that all teenagers live in a society in which they have many options and must make an individual choice about their future. In many parts of the world, one’s identity is determined by family status or society’s dictates. In other words, there is no choice to make.

Even the most biological events can be viewed in cultural contexts that are incredibly varied. Consider two very different cultural responses to menstruation in young girls. In the United States, girls in public schools often receive information on menstruation around 5th grade, get a kit containing feminine hygiene products, and receive some sort of education about sexual health. Contrast this with some developing countries where menstruation is not publicly addressed, or where girls on their period are forced to miss school due to limited access to feminine products or unjust attitudes about menstruation.

It’s valuable to take into consideration that these themes are based upon what is commonly referred to as “WEIRD” societies, that is societies which are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic. American society certainly falls within this description, but by no means do all societies. Childhood actually has different meanings around the world. Depending on various cultures’ shared patterns of behaviors, interactions and understandings, we see different constructs of childhood emerge. Despite these differences, in 1989 the United Nations General Assembly adopted the first human rights treaty which articulates basic universal civil, political, economic, social, health and cultural rights of children, known as the Convention on the Rights of the Child (UNCRC). According to the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF), the Convention:

• Defined childhood as a separate space from adulthood and recognized that what is appropriate for an adult may not be suitable for a child.
• Called on governments to provide material assistance and support to families and to prevent children from being separated from their parents.
• Recognized that children are the holders of their own rights and are therefore not passive recipients of charity but empowered actors in their own development.

As a direct result of the policies that were able to be put in place in the years since the Convention was adopted, the world has seen significant improvement in the quality of life for children. Almost unbelievably, as of the writing of this text, the United States is the only member of the United Nations that has not ratified the treaty. It is believed that this is the case because of very powerful lobbying by special interest groups.