Youth to Midlife: At What Point is Personality Development Complete? #AtoZChallenge

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. I’m cheating a little with my letter Y post in the #AtoZChallenge, because I’m not really talking about any Y topic. That is, my topic for today is personality development from youth to midlife.

Many people believe that someone’s personality development is more or less complete by the age of eighteen. This isn’t true. The last phase in emotional development, which covers people’s individuation from everyone else, isn’t complete until a young adult has reached age 25 or so.

Similarly, cognitive abilities such as executive functioning, which is important for impulse control, haven’t fully developed until a person is in their late twenties.

As such, can we say that someone is well and truly an adult by the age of 30? Not necessarily. After all, life experiences also contribute to adulting. This means that in today’s society, where people leave home later, many don’t start a family until they’re in their mid-thirties, etc., with respect to life choices, someone hasn’t truly faced the most difficult ones until they’re around age 40. Which is midlife whether you want it or not. Yes, Millennials like me might want to pretend to still be youthful, and this makes sense from a personality development standpoint, but we’ve most likely had (nearly) half our life behind us.

What does this mean if you want to work on personal growth? What does it mean when you’re struggling with a personality disorder? Personality disorders are said to start in early adulthood and be stable over time, but are they?

I try to see it as there being hope. People with certain personality disorders, such as borderline personality disorder, do experience improvement of their symptoms as they get older. In fact, when I was in my mid-twenties, my psychiatrist told me my dissociative and emotion regulation problems (which were at the time not diagnosed as BPD, by the way) would likely get better as I got older. So far, they haven’t, but then again I (hopefully) still have half my life ahead of me.

Youth: Issues Specific to Intellectually or Developmentally Disabled Children #AtoZChallenge

Posted on by Astrid

Hi everyone. Phew, we’re almost done with the #AtoZChallenge. For my letter Y post, I thought I’d talk about issues specific to youth with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

Children, disabled or not, by definition, are still growing and developing towards their full potential. As a result, most developmentally and intellectually disabled children and young people will not qualify for long-term care. They are, instead, served under the Youth Act, which falls under the local government. This means that their parents or carers will need to reapply for care at least every year.

Most children with intellectual or developmental disabilities will go to school. Like I mentioned before, those with milder disabilities, due to “suited education”, are forced to go into mainstream classes. This particularly applies to autistic or otherwise neurodivergent children with an average or above-average IQ, but when doing research for this post, I found out that children with a mild intellectual disability (IQ 55-70) won’t qualify for special ed unless they have additional needs too.

Children with moderate to severe intellectual disabilities and those with mild intellectual disabilities and additional issues will usually go into special education. Usually, these schools have different educational levels depending on the severity of the child’s disability. I heard that some schools allow pupils in the highest level to take part in the lowest level regular school, called practice education, part-time. Practice education has only recently become part of the regular, diploma-earning educational system; until I think last year or the year before, pupils in these schools would just earn a certificate.

The most profoundly disabled children, who are deemed “unteachable”, will go to day centers for children and adolescents with intellectual disabilities. Some of these day centers do have a “school prep” group too.

I feel very strongly that “suited education” and the Youth Act leave behind a lot of children with intellectual and developmental disabilities. I mean, the government wants to cut the youth care budget even more and, though I understand this given the fact that one in seven children nowadays receives a form of youth services, this should not affect children with genuine intellectual and developmental disabilities. Like myself twenty to thirty years ago, though in my case being left behind was due to my parents’ denial.