Life History of Joanne
Joanne was born in National Women’s Hospital, Auckland, New Zealand in October 1964. Joanne’s father worked full time as a plumber, her mother worked part time as a factory worker while also bringing up Joanne and her older brother. Joanne has spent all her life, from birth to present day, living in West Auckland. Joanne has never married and does not have any children. At the time of this interview Joanne is at the middle adulthood stage of her life. This life history follows Joanne’s life stages and identifies her major normative age graded events, normative history graded events and also non normative events, and reflects on the impact of these events on her development. Normative age graded influence included
Cognitive Development Joanne states that she struggled with the school work that was given to her. One explanation is that Piaget’s Concrete Operational Stage, (Santrock, 2008) Joanne’s may have been impaired which could be explained by the effects of sexual, physical and emotional abuse that she endured from age 10 (non normative event). Piaget states that in this stage children can reason logically as long as reasoning can be applied to specific or concrete examples (Santrock, 2008). Research has linked child abuse with impaired cognitive development (Kurtz et al, 1993).
Psychosocial Development
During this stage Joanne experienced sexual, physical and emotion abuse from within the family and from Joanne’s neighbour (non normative event). There was also the start of school for Joanne, not that she can remember her first day at school, yet according to her mother Joanne went off to school following the other children from the neighborhood (age graded normative event). Joanne went on to explain that she did not have many friends at school and kept to herself. Joanne discussed that the only way to get the children at school to like or involve Joanne was for Joanne to start acting out with angry outbursts and become a bully to other children (non normative event). Poor emotion regulation, difficulty in adapting to school, attachment problems, problems in peer relations and delinquency can be attributed to the childhood abuse (Santrock, 2008).