How to Grow Up

I find the science of human development fascinating because we all have our own experience growing up, and understandably have our own ideas about how that happens. What the science of human development does is it shines a light on all the illusions about who we are that we may have convinced ourselves of along the way. It either validates our experience or broadens that highly personal and anecdotal series of fading memories toward a frame of reference beyond ourselves and reflected by humanity.

What it teaches us is not just that we are so unique in how we specifically came to be the person we are from the person we were a relatively short time ago, but also that our experience of that maturation was not all that unique. We are constantly reinventing our own history. With the science of human development, we have to confront the fact that our successes may not have been as special or tied to own abilities as our ego may direct us to think at times, but to circumstances beyond ourselves instead. At the same time, we also have to confront the fact that our circumstance was not always solely responsible for our personal failings, but to our own doings.

The science of human development forces us to concede that there is more to humanity than ourselves, and that we are not merely products of our environment or products of nature's indifference, but that we are products of both to varying degrees that we may not even realize. No other science is as innately personal, perhaps with the exclusion of modern health, and likewise, in no other science does nearly everyone alive consider themselves an expert.

For this reason, adults (parents) are often inaccurate when making assumptions about the behaviors and interests of children living today (often interpreting the worst), for they compare the real actions of their children today with the invention they created around their own childhood, and they understandably don't like what they see. What they don't remember is that children themselves have never changed, just the various hang-ups of the society around them. Human developmental science works to remind us of what changes and what doesn't, so we don't go drugging our children out of existence so as to pair their experience with the perfect or imperfect childhood invention of our memories.

It could be said that we are not truly grown up until we recognize the fact of our existence is a constant maturation, a constant imperceptible development, rather than being confined strictly to the condensation of time behind us. The notion that we are all on a flat-line towards death in the present could be considered implicit immaturity. Maturity, in contrast comes not with age or experience, but with the understanding of the transient nature of our mental state in a constant flux of development.