Human Development

1. Understanding yourself thru one of Eriksen's stages.

Defend one of Eric Eriksen’s human development stages as a helpful way for understanding your own personality.

I can relate to Eriksen’s identity versus role confusion development stage. I immigrated from Korea to United States when I was twelve years old. This is when my puberty has just started and I was already confused with the physical changes I was going through. This confusion of my identity grew exponentially as I started school in America. I didn’t speak the language or recognized the different races of students in my class. As I started to understand and speak English I started to make friends and I immediately considered myself as “American.” During my teenage years, I remember trying all different things to make me look like an American. I bleached my hair, bought color contacts and wore lots of make-up to mimic my friends. My parents were not happy with the physical changes I did during high school and was afraid that I would completely lose my Korean culture. They started to send me to a Korean church where I started to regain my heritage. In summary, this confusing part of my development has molded me into someone who has a very long and difficult time making final decisions. It has definitely gotten better where I can proudly identify myself as “Korean-American” but I do find myself a bit intrigued when I feel like I’m just a little more passionate about Korea playing in the world cup versus America.

2. Your advice to young parents

Given the complexity of human development, what advice would you give young parents today?

Our book emphasize greatly on how physical and emotional attention is extremely important during child development. I do agree that the attachment a child has towards for their parents originate from the attention they received when they were young. However, with my personal experiences and observance throughout my life, I think the best parents are the ones that...