Stages of Life: Birth To Death

Erickson became fascinated with the social psychology and individual development.
Due to his excitement, he created a cycle of development throughout a person's life; birth to living to death. The first stage is Basic Trust vs. Mistrust is one of the stages of development that a child will face through their life along with contexts, such as the community they live in. I find this level task in infancy of developing a sense of basic trust that one's parent or primary will be adequately nurturing. In reading the stages, the initial level of basic trust and mistrust is quite captivating. In the first few days of a baby's life there are drastic changes. For example, the day my niece Sloan was born. Her eyes were closed and the next day when I came to see her and my sister in the hospital her eyes began to open. Sloan peeked over through the hospital bed with such furious curiosity, simply looking at anything. It was so fascinating observing her in initial days  I remembered discussing with my sister, Sarah about seeing surroundings as a baby. Everything is news, like sounds and colors and noises and peoples voices. One thing Sloan was acutely aware of was clapping, she would blink with a surprised expression. Erikson states that you cannot be in a social context without a sense of identity. From the minute you are born you are given a name, a gender, and physical attributes. For example, the color of your hair, the amount of hair on your head or the lack of hair.

Erickson states that in school we enter fractured landscape of context. I think that it is the same for young development, such as learned things as well as other innate abilities. For example, it was crazy to hold hands with Sloan. Her fingers grasped so strongly and her fingers were so small. While she knew how to grasp, she had to learn how to clap by watching people around her. When we sang songs, we would clap and Sloan would smile and make giggly coo sounds while watching. One day my mom was watching The Chew with Sloan. The show always begins with the boisterous audience clapping, once Sloan heard the upbeat tune and joyous clapping Sloan joined. It was so fascinating because she did not even realize she learned how to clap.

I think that Erickson is right when he says that during adolescence, youth go throw identity confusion. While youth deal with identity issues, babies also deal with identity. Babies are referenced to them by their name but their name is one tiny aspect, they have to sink into their surroundings and who lives around them, who is friendly, who is unkind and who are the people that I am told are family. For example Sloan only knew I was her "Auntie Em" because my sister told her. If Sarah did not tell Sloan her that I was her "Auntie Em", Sloan would not connect me to her mom and Grammie.