Adulthood is a Crazy New World

        Physical, cognitive, and social development continues across the life span with a focus on three major issues: nature & nurture, continuity stages, and stability & change. Similar to the complexity of the human mind and body are the stages of adulthood. Early, middle, and late adulthood are all similar but have their differences. Our temperament and personality stay stable but we endure physical changes that are unavoidable. - Carlie Daquino & Olivia Miele      

[4evergrowing-blog]

Watch US Trailer 1 from Amour (2012). A couple's bond of love is severely tested.

In the movie, Amour, Georges and Anne are a couple in their eighties. They are retired music teachers,and their daughter, also a musician, lives in Britain with her family. One day, Anne has a stroke, and the couple's bond of love is severely tested. Her muscle strength, reaction time, and stamina are rapidly diminishing quicker than expected for late adulthood because of her stroke. In early adulthood, physical decline begins gradually and becomes more prevalent later in life especially after age 65. Anne’s levels of strength and stamina are declining since the blood supply to her brain was reduced from the stroke. In late adulthood, strokes can cause paralysis, vision problems, memory loss, speech and language problems. Aging is especially prevalent when text appears smaller and others seem to mumble even though it is just eyesight and hearing that is diminishing. Anne does not read and hardly speaks after her stroke. Anne also shows less interest in physical activity which can accelerate aging. Staying active helps with maintaining quick memory retention. Previously being a musician, Anne should have kept practicing her instrument in order to enhance muscles and energy. Heart disease can be prevented by stimulating brain cell development through exercise and activity. 

[4evergrowing-blog]

Warren Schmidt is a retired 66 year old man who embarks on a journey to his estranged daughter's wedding only to discover more about himself and life than he ever expected. Although this clip is not the full movie trailer, it perfectly embodies Schmidt’s fatigue, irritability, and agony over his wife’s sudden ugliness from old age over the course of the film. Health and the aging brain take a toll on individuals in late adulthood. With aging comes a neural processing lag so Schmidt takes a bit more time to react, solve, and remember names. He shows less activity which accelerates brain aging. Later in the movie, he becomes more stressed about his daughter’s wedding, stays inside more, and remains inactive. Exercise helps keeps the development of neural connections strong and prevent memory loss. Schmidt shows gradual memory loss from his inactivity and could have counteracted some effects of brain aging by participating in aerobics programs or gym workouts which would have taken some of his stress from his daughter’s wedding off of him. Oh Schmidt! What many people don’t realize is that stress can also wear down telomeres which affect how our cells age. As stress rapidly shortens the telomeres of elderly bodies, aging speeds up and can lead to loss of important DNA or the inability to replicate a chromosome. What this means is that stress can lead to different cancers when telomeres shorten. The result of aging cells is an aging body.

[4evergrowing-blog]

The movie Still Alice is about a women who went from having an amazing life to fighting each day to be the person she had always been. Alice Howland was happily married, had three children, and was a linguistics professor. Everything changed when she was diagnosed with Early-onset Alzheimer’s Disease. The movie displays Alice’s life and the challenges that she faced with her progressive decline in memory and cognitive functioning.  In the movie, Alice loses her ability to tie her shoes, speak, and recall the names of her own children. With aging, changes in cognitive functioning occur which can result in difficulty with attention, learning, recognition, recall, and memory.   With Alice’s Early-onset Alzheimer's, she experiences severe changes in her cognitive abilities at a much younger age than would be expected. As people age, fluid intelligence begins to fade while crystallized intelligence enhances. Fluid intelligence is our ability to solve problems quickly. We begin to lose this. Crystallized intelligence is our ability to use our skills, knowledge, and experiences without having to use our memory. Due to Alice’s illness, she is losing her crystallized intelligence and her fluid intelligence.

[4evergrowing-blog]

Glenn Holland is a musician and composer whose primary goal is to write an amazing piece of music that will leave a mark on the music world. Mr. Holland takes a job as a high school music teacher in order to take care of his wife and son. The movie shows Mr. Holland's journey through 30 years of his life as a teacher, husband, father, colleague, and friend. Significant world events are shown throughout the movie to portray the many changes that take place over the 30 year period. As Mr. Holland shares his love of music with his students over 3 decades, he struggles with his marriage, his relationship with his son (who is deaf), his difficulty with accomplishing his goal of creating an important piece of music, and feeling a sense of accomplishment as the years quickly fly by. As Mr. Holland faces retirement because the school's music program is cut, he learns that his true success is in the relationships that he had made over the course of his life and the many people he has touched. As people become older, they embark on many different life stages. This movies displays the different roles that Glenn Holland took on throughout his life.  

[4evergrowing-blog]

Parenthood is a movie about a multi-generational family and their experiences with the challenges of parenting, marriage, careers, and aging. The movie illustrates Erikson's stages of social and emotional development, particularly throughout adulthood. The movie focuses on 4 adult siblings, 2 who are married, one who is divorced, and one who is a single parent. The challenge of intimacy vs. isolation is shown in the character, Helen, who is divorced and struggling to raise her children on her own. She is lonely and desires an intimate, committed relationship but has becomes distrustful of men and feels hopeless that she will find a caring relationship. The stage, generativity vs. stagnation describes a time in adulthood when careers, marriages, and families are in place and the focus becomes giving back to society by raising well adjusted children, being successful at work, and being a productive member of a community. Gil, the main character in the movie, is focused on being a "great" parent, being successful at work, and helping in his community by coaching little league. Gil questions how well he is doing in all of his roles. Ego Integrity vs. despair is the stage of development when individuals look back at the accomplishments in their life and evaluate our successes. Gil's father, Frank, who is the patriarch of the family, is a critical, distant father who realizes the mistakes that he made in raising his children and tries to come to terms with his relationship with his wife, children, and grandchildren.   

[4evergrowing-blog]

In the movie, The Intern, Benjamin is a retired widow who is struggling to fill the emptiness of  this new chapter in his life. He feels lonely and unproductive and is desperate to regain his sense of accomplishment and satisfaction.   As a result, Ben decides to become a senior intern at a fashion company that is run by Jules, a young, bright, hardworking, woman who is trying to juggle the pressures of a career with the demands of a family. Benjamin is faced with the challenges of working with far younger co-workers in a company that uses very modern business practices and technology. Ben musters up the confidence to work under these conditions with a boss who isn’t very interested in working with him. Ben’s self confidence and courage rub off on the people around him and he takes on a parent role for many of his younger colleagues. Ben recognizes the struggle for self-confidence that his younger friends are facing and inspires them to take risks in order to get what they want.  For instance, Ben helps one of the other interns to gain the self confidence to ask out the girl that he likes. He also helps his boss with her marital problems. Benjamin took a step out of his comfort zone and now has filled the empty void in his life with meaningful relationships and interesting work. He shows everyone that we need to be confident and try new things. This will ensure that we will live happy and satisfying lives.

[4evergrowing-blog]

In the movie, The Fault in our Stars, Hazel Lancaster has cancer and meets her boyfriend, Gus, at a support group. The movie depicts their romantic love story. Gus was supposedly in remission but his cancer returned. The couple knew that their time together was limited and tried to savor every moment that they had left together. Hazel was heartbroken by Gus’ passing. Although she was aware of his illness and the inevitability of his death, no amount of time can have prepared her for the shock. Our culture views death as a very scary idea that promotes fear in many people. Understanding and accepting death as a natural part of life is difficult. The way each person views death is highly dependent upon their cultural and spiritual beliefs.

[4evergrowing-blog]

Oskar Schell is a nine-year old boy who is grieving the death of his father who was killed in the World Trade Center attack on September 11, 2001. Oskar is struggling with the loss of his father and displays all of the emotions and experiences the Elizabeth Kubler-Ross describes in her stages of grief.  Oskar experiences denial, the first stage when life doesn't make sense and it's hard to know how to get through each day. Oscar experiences intense anger and pain which causes him to be distant from his mother. Bargaining is seen when Oscar struggles with overwhelming feelings of guilt and regret and wishes that he had done things differently with his father. Oscar experiences depression and overwhelming sadness over missing his father. Two years after his father dies, Oskar finds a key in his Dad's closet. He sets out on a journey to find the lock in the hope that it will enable him to better comes to terms with his father's death and gain acceptance over the loss, which is Kubler-Ross' final stage of grief.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_quK9SEGYE