It is visibly obvious that a child goes through specific stages of development from birth, infancy, and into childhood nursing, crawling, walking, running, cuing, talking, etc. Although Childhood Development is a well established field in psychology, other researchers began focusing on how adults continue to develop from an infant’s self-centered worldview into mature adulthood. Some were curious how some adults’ behaviors and worldview still resembled the impulsivity and egocentrism of teenager development while other people seemed to continue on to develop greater maturity, wisdom and effectiveness while engaging with increasing complexity in the world. Fascinatingly, just like in childhood development, adult development also tends to grow in specific stages, which have been validated by research across cultures, regardless of gender, race or personally since the late 1960’s. Developmental psychology researchers over the past four decades have clarified that adults can continue to mature and develop in terms of stages of ego development which let’s define so as to include a mix of identity, worldview & values. There appear to be specific structure stages of adult ego development; each of which tend to evolve in complexity in the way that we view, interpret & relate to the world, which seem to be organized around our value-systems (what is important) and self-identity (what “I” identify with). So humans tend to develop from birth through adulthood in a progressive sequence of stages, which you might imagine looks like an increasingly widening spiral—indeed on of the most popular Stage Development theory systems is named Spiral Dynamics originally developed by Clare Graves.

Manu Melwin Joy

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