Natalie Salter

Period 2

U5 Observation

Fictitious Name: Lindy

Biological Development

The person I chose to interview was 16 years old and her name was Lindy. Lindy seemed

nervous when our interview started. Seeing as we did not know one another very well, it started

out kind of awkward. I started asking some of my questions and it became more natural as we

went on, and her answers got more personal. My first biological question for Lindy was, “At what

age was your first menstrual period, and what was that experience like?” She told me she had

her first period at age 12, and felt very awkward by the whole situation. She talked about feeling

the need to hide her body, and felt uneasy and left out. This correlates with the research that is

current. As stated by Berger, “girls who mature later than their peers tend to be more confident

than those who mature early on “ (Berger, 2014, pg 305) . I then began to ask Lindy about her

middle school experiences involving her biological development. As mentioned by Berger,

middle school tends to be a time where academic achievement decreases, and behavioral

problems increase. Lindy talked about how she usually was a decent student, but she

remembers feeling awkward when she was in middle school. She did not want people to know

she had had her period, and she felt that her fear of not fitting in or being made fun of was a

large factor in her stress and distraction from academic success. This is normal. Academic

success tends to decrease and behavioral problems tend to increase once children reach

middle school. (Berger, 2014) The final question regarding biological development that I asked

was, “how do you think your biological development affected you, and is it harder to biologically
develop as a female than it is to develop as a male?” She laughed before she responded. She

talked about how she feels that had she developed later, or at the same time as her friends, she

would’ve felt a lot more confident and less ashamed of herself. She smiled and looked at me

when she asked, “Isn’t being a boy always easier?” She then discussed how puberty is never

seems like a shameful thing. Aside from voice cracks, boys seem to thrive on the growth of one

another, and envy to be a “man”.

Cognitive Development

Lindy first asked me what cognitive development was. I explained that it is the development of

the brain and information processing. (Berger, 2014). After I said this, she stated, “oh, well

language arts has always been hard for me. I just never seem to understand the books I read or

how grammar works.” I smiled and told her I feel the same way about math. I then began to

discuss how cognitive development works with things like this, such as abstract and logical

thinking. The first question I asked her was, “do you remember at what age you began to

understand conservation?” Conservation is “​Conservation refers to a logical thinking ability

which, according to the psychologist Jean Piaget, is not present in children during the

preoperational stage of their development at ages 2–7, but develops in the concrete operational

stage at ages seven to eleven​.“ (Berger, 2014, pg 402). She told me about remembering when

she was little, and fighting over the tall, skinny glass with her older brother, because neither of

them understood it held the same amount of liquid as the shorter, wider glass. She said that

they were around the ages of 4 and 6. This shows that her brother was almost in the concrete

operational stage, and was almost at the age he could understand conservation. I asked her if

they stopped fighting after her brother turned 7, and she said they did stop fighting shortly after.

She replied that her brother actually taught her conservation when she was almost 7, because

she continued to fight over the tall glass with her younger sister. The next question I asked was,
“Do you remember learning to read?” She began to tell me about reading simple books and

struggling to memorize letters with her mom. Eventually, it all clicked, but she said it took her a

while, and she was cognitively developing slower than most of the other kids in her grade. I

asked her how that experience was, and she explained that it was hard. She said that kids

would make fun of her and call her dumb because she could not read. We talked about her

emotional development a little bit and how some of these other forms of development affected

one another.

Psychosocial Development

This was the topic I addressed last, because of the relationship between biological and cognitive

development to psychosocial. As stated by Berger, “Erikson originally envisioned eight stages of

development, three after adolescence.“ (Berger, 2014, pg. 464). This shows how much all of

these stages connect, and how humans still continue to develop over time. We talked about

selection (Berger, 2014) and how the way that children and people in general tend to be with

people who share their interests affected her self concept. Psychosocial development is “​the

development of human beings' cognitive, emotional, intellectual, and social capabilities and

functioning over the course of the life span, from infancy through old age.” (Berger, 2014 pg.

392). Seeing as cognitive development is already included, and biological development plays a

large part in this, I thought I would ask her, “what do you think the biggest contributor to your

overall psychosocial development was or still is?” She responded that she believes her peers

have the largest input. “I never really knew who I was until I got away from them, they had

created who I was, and to this day I still think parts of me are the same parts of them, and that

they became me. They destroyed me as the built me into the person I was going to be, and the

one I am right now.” Lindy was a shy girl and said that social gatherings were hard. She was

afraid of men when she was little, naturally being attached to her mother and grandma. “Being
the shy girl was hard, but it helped me to learn to stay quiet and respectful when needed be,

and I learned to be somewhat independent before my friends took over”. Most adolescent girls

are strongly influenced by their peers. It was very difficult for me personally to grow up in a

clique, which is, “a small group of people with shared interests, who are exclusive and do not let

others join willingly” (Berger, 2014, pg 456) I grew up in similar circumstances and related to

Lindy in many regards. I found this experience interesting because I had a personal fable

(Berger, 2014) that I was one of the only people to go through these problems. She helped me

realize that we do have a lot in common, and that I might relate to people of other cultures as

well. It is amazing to see how all of the aspects of development and the environment shape who

we are.
Reference List

Berger, K. S. (2014). ​Invitation to the life span​ (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Worth

Publishers.