Question

What are Erikson's tasks for emerging adulthood and midlife? And what do they mean?

Answer 1

According to Erikson's theory of psychosocial development, emerging adulthood denotes the time of young adulthood between the ages of 19 and 40 years old.

This psychosocial stage is the crisis between Intimacy VS Isolation, the major conflict revolves around forming intimate and loving relationships with others. Successful completion of this stage is denoted by forming fulfilling relationships, failure would be an inability to form relationships leading to feelings of loneliness and isolation

The important tasks of this stage are:-

• Caring about the needs of others, reciprocal relationships, getting and giving love both is important at this stage
• sharing oneself with others, maintaining a strong sense of self-identity
• Having intimate relationships, sex, intimacy, emotional intimacy, closeness, intimacy does not only comes from sexual partners, but also from family and friends.
• Making commitments to other for long-terms

Middle adulthood comes with the stage of Generativity vs Stagnation between the ages of 45 to 60 years.

Generativity refers to the ability to make your mark on the world by doing something for others, caring for them, accomplishing things that would make this world a better place.

Stagnation refers to the failure to make a remarkable contribution to the world, it makes the person feel disconnected and uninvolved within the society and community they reside and belong to.

Leaving a legacy, bringing up good children, contributing to the welfare of the society, living a life that indlude helping and being there for others contributes to the Generativity