Understanding Emerging and Late Adulthood Lifespan Development Through a Cultural Lens: Otter Voice Meeting Notes

Understanding Emerging and Late Adulthood Lifespan Development Through a Cultural Lens

Amber Watkins52min

Speaker 1

00:09

Hello and welcome to the thoughtful counselor, a podcast dedicated to bringing you innovative and evidence based counseling and mental health content designed to enhance your life. Whether you're a clinician, supervisor, educator, or a person wanting to learn more about the counseling process, we are here to demystify mental health through conversations with a wide range of counseling professional powerhouses. In each episode, you'll learn about current issues in the field, new science, and real life lessons learned from the therapy room. Thank you for joining us on our journey through the wide world of counseling. There's a lot to explore here. So sit back, take a deep breath. And let's get started.

Margaret Lamar, PhD

00:54

Welcome to the barbell counselor, I am Margaret Lamar. And today I am joined by doctors to Vietri Dixon Saxon, so thrilled to have her to talk again about lifespan development. So welcome. And will you tell us about your journey to get into this profession and to counseling?

Savitri Dixon-Saxon, PhD

01:18

Yeah, I'll try to give you the abridged version excuse me, of this years ago, this is an important thing I think for anyone listening. years ago, after I graduated with an undergraduate degree in journalism and mass communications, I discovered that that part of my personality that was investigated wasn't actually a good match for journalism. And I was confused and unsure about what to do. And I said something to my mother about wanting to help people so that other people didn't find themselves where I was, you know, having committed for years to a degree and really not wanting to do what I had been trained to do. I didn't realize how common that was of an experience at the time. And I could describe what I wanted to do. But I didn't know what profession that was, you know, and I told my mother about it. And interestingly enough, within 12 hours, she met someone who was working in student affairs. And that site seemed like that was really where I was headed Career Services. And working in students, student affairs and supporting college students would be a leadership development and their overall development. And that was a good match. For me, I found a degree that matched what I was interested in. And I got a graduate degree in Student Personnel Services. And my first job was at an art school. And I quickly realized that the population of the art school was a population that had significant needs for support beyond what I was trained to do. And one day it dawned on me, even I was like, I need more, I need something more specialized to be able to support students in this capacity. And I started doing an exploration and talking to people around me and realize that counseling was the way I wanted to go. And the reason I tell you that backstory is important, because sometimes we don't have a direct route to finding out what we want to be doing. It all depends on your exposure, and the kinds of resources you have around you, and the exposure of your mentors and the people you look up to. Right. And it was difficult for me to make a decision. After you know, I kind of felt like you had wasted four years of my undergraduate education. And now I was going to regroup, excuse me and do something different, you know, Was it all a waste that I wasn't really sure at that time. But what I can't, what I would want anybody to know listening to this is sometimes and it's important for your clients to sometimes you don't take a direct path where you're going, and you can't get hung up on not taking the direct path to keep you from following your calling. But the other thing I've learned at this point, because at this point, my career is 31 years old. And what I would say to people is what I would want people to know from my own story is that there's nothing you learn that you on us. So, you know, I got into counselor education through a different pathway. But I have loved it ever since. And most of my career has been spent as a counselor, educator and now an administrator in higher education. But I continue to I say to people, that counseling is my professional master. And it is where I continue to focus and learn and grow as much as I can.

Margaret Lamar, PhD

05:38

So you made the jump from counselor than to counseling faculty member and now you are in administration and how you've been doing and you've been doing that for a while, I believe. Yes,

Savitri Dixon-Saxon, PhD

05:51

yes, yes. The institution I work now, I came here as a program chair. And I have moved in successive positions in administration always, though, always staying tethered to counseling, I started the first, at that time, it was mental health counseling program at Walden University, and we were only the second mental health counseling online program to be accredited. And I led the program through that exercise with a lot of help and support from some wonderful colleagues. But, um, shortly thereafter, well, around that time, I wound up expanding my role to as associate dean to serve other programs. So since that time have also provided oversight for the accreditation of some social work programs as well.

Margaret Lamar, PhD

06:55

Oh, and so it sounds like you have a lot of degrees? I do. That's super impressive. I saw that you also have an MBA as well.

Savitri Dixon-Saxon, PhD

07:06

Yeah, I do. You know, one thing, I think one way I branded myself as an educator is to always encourage people to keep learning and growing, and to be thirsty for new information. Because it's not just getting access to new information. For your own edification, it's really necessary to be able to serve people well, because society is dynamic. And people, you know, if one of the one of the things that I'm on alert for right now, is, how will our society change? How will the next generation be different as a result of living through a pandemic. And now, there's so many other things that they're living through, that my generation did in their formative years, you know, gas prices being the highest they've ever been, ever in history. Home prices being what they are, and young people really not knowing whether or not that will be a part of their dream. If they can't benefit getting can't benefit from generational wealth, you know, all of those things, make me curious about what impact it will have on how people see themselves and how they navigate the world and relate to other people.

Margaret Lamar, PhD

08:37

Yeah, so I, that's a great segue into what I was going to ask you about, which is, how did you become interested in human development and I know you've done many other you have many areas of interest in terms of your research in your work. And I'm curious about how human development was a draw for you as a field of study.

Savitri Dixon-Saxon, PhD

09:02

So Murdock program was one that emphasize social psychosocial identity development. And if you have time for this story, it's really important for me to share how the personal has informed the professional I was. At the time, I started making an observation about my mom and her sisters, all of whom are well educated, and their focus and dissatisfaction with body image. And that oftentimes was communicated to me and my sister and and I noticed that African American women who were not as educated as the women in my family didn't have the same Hank didn't appear to have the same hang ups about body image. Now, I will tell you that has changed so Social media has changed a lot of this. But I wanted to understand where was the dissatisfaction with body image in a variety of forms coming from from middle class African American women. And I remember reading this article by Sherlyn, Peck brown, about internalized oppression, we had an assignment in class. And I was doing an annotated bibliography, I had done an annotated bibliography and was reporting out to my class colleagues, about, you know, what I was reading and that kind of thing. And one of my classmates said to me, she was like, when you start talking about internalized oppression, you get so excited, like, you really need to think about how you're going to continue to develop this research, or how were you going to go where you could go with this. And I thought I was only going to be focusing on body image. But I also knew that I was really curious about how African American women showed up in the workplace, the fact that they, you know, I was around a lot of college students, I had concerns about why they weren't being developed as leaders, what was going on there. And that this construct of internalized oppression stuck with me. And then I said, the more I read, the more I understood about positive self definition. And I started to understand that there is this process for African American women, at least from my perspective, where we actually grow into being these people who we can grow into being these people who become so other referent, white reference, power reference, all of those things, that it impacts the way we white reference, male reference, you know, it impacts the way that we see ourselves. And there is this process across the lifespan of being very positive, what because what a lot of people don't understand, and this is very true for African American girls. We oftentimes in our world, think of marginalized or traditionally underrepresented groups as only being from a deficit, right. But what I understood the way I grew up, was that as a child, I was treated so favorably in my home and with my family. And at the at the time that I was starting to really delve into this, my oldest niece was born. And so I was visiting my family, and my extended family will oftentimes convene on a Sunday afternoon. And they I noticed that she was an infant, they would take her carrier, and put her carrier in the center of the dinner table, once we finished eating so that everyone had a chance to either look in her face, or say something because everybody was vying for time with this child. So what happens that this is how a community treats a child? How do you get from there to a point where a person feels like they are less than, or their immutable characteristics don't add up and don't measure up? And so what I was interested in is really examining the intersection of race and sex identity, or gender identity, really gender identity for African American females. And what happened across the lifespan? What What would you know, what was the what is the experience of African American women? And of course, I'm happy to say that I don't believe that African American Women's Development stops at a place of only being internalized, internally oppressed. I believe that part of our self actualization is this process to become to have positive self definition. But to get there means that you don't, you are no longer referent to the more dominant groups. And this is something that people oftentimes get offended by when I use this term. You learn how to navigate and manipulate systems for your benefit and for the benefit of those people you're responsible for. And the reason examining this was so important for me personally, was because what I foresaw for myself was this time a period when I was going to be responsible for me, myself, possibly my partner, my parents, maybe my grandchildren, and I needed to have a voice, I needed to feel powerful. And I needed to understand what was the journey to feeling powerful for me, what were those crises that I needed to resolve, in order to feel like a powerful enough person to navigate systems for my benefit, and not go through the world only feeling acted on, but feeling like a very powerful actor in my life. And it was very personal for me. But that's how I wound up really embracing conversations about human development, lifespan, identity development. And I was I'm grateful that I had some wonderful teachers and mentors, who encouraged me to take that on. And I'm grateful for my friend, who was my classmate who was able to identify a real spark in me and say, Hey, I think this is it. Oh, yeah, I love

Margaret Lamar, PhD

16:13

that, that those critical incidents of development and how you've been able to identify those and think about them in the context of this sort of larger work study that you've been doing, or this work? So tell us about your areas of focus in the book, I believe you were looking at adults, older adults? Well, what is that, like doing that, like also going through being in those stages yourself.

Savitri Dixon-Saxon, PhD

16:43

So I looked at two groups, and I was very selfish and what I chose, and my colleagues were very generous in allowing me to focus on emerging adulthood in early adulthood, and also older adults. And it's no surprise to you that I chose to focus on those two areas, because I have a daughter and two nieces. Who too well, my daughter and my oldest niece are actually in early adulthood, or in emerging adulthood, excuse me, I need to correct that emerging adulthood. And I have two parents, of course, who are older adults, one of whom has a significant disability as a result of a massive stroke. And they, my parents live in a rural community, and don't have access to as many resources as I wish they had to age well in place. But I really wanted to understand what their needs might be at this point in life and to really focus on that. And I will tell you that the process of writing and doing the research to be able to write has really changed the way I interact with both groups. My niece and my daughter, and my parents, and I think that it has probably working in this book is probably one of the been one of the most personally beneficial activities I've ever taken on professionally.

Margaret Lamar, PhD

18:29

Well, as a person who also has parents, I feel like I'm going to need you to expand on this, how this has changed the way you interact and communicate and think about their experiences. How did that change for you?

Savitri Dixon-Saxon, PhD

18:43

Well, for my parents, you know, my parents have always been to very capable people. They knew they learned a lot, they studied hard, they were able to provide a good life for me and my sister, and they have been able to afford what they need it to be able to live well for most of their lives. But because my parents live in a rural community, it means that they don't have equal access to the best health care. So when my father had his stroke, there was no hospital for him to go to. And he, it took a long time for him to be able to get health care, get good health care he needed. And what I started to realize, but not except that there was a different dynamic with my parents that I hadn't really accepted that my parents who had been strong advocates for themselves and for other people, their entire adult lives. Were not having the same experience when they interacted with medical providers, you know, and I started to recognize that there is the Is intergenerational interdependence that changes. And you know, those who are biblical scholars will may be familiar with the scripture that the, you know, the young are strong, but the old no the way, you know, and there is this, there's this change in the dynamic when your parents are not as strong as they used to be, and you having to provide the muscle, and also be able to be humble enough to also accept their wisdom, you know, and so for a person of middle age where in most of my life, I have a pretty high sense of self efficacy, that was an adjustment for me also, to know that it was really important for my for me to respect my parents wisdom, but also to understand that they needed my strength in a way that they may not have in the past. One of the best things that I learned as a result of writing this is that we need to encourage our students to work with their younger clients to think about their older future. And I know you've heard me say this before, so important for people to think about, how are the decisions I made today, going to impact my abilities, as I get older? You know, I think now about those years why I toiled to be able to put something away, you know, and now I'm thinking, I'm like, it was a good thing. I wish I'd done more. And I wish I'd been thoughtful like that, when I think about the ways that, you know, I gave myself a break about not taking care of my body, the way that I wish I had, and now trying to play catch up in some places where I've been a little more relaxed, you know, when you think about where you choose to live, and whether or not you have a community of extended support beyond just your household, you know, do you are you thoughtful about whether or not you can access the technology that allows you to age in place, because I think that that's something else I've learned, and I've been working with, you know, trying to help my parents with is that you can actually extend your ability to successfully age in place through the use of technology. Prior to COVID, my father was seeing an occupational therapist, at least twice a week and a physical therapist three times a week. And all of that changed at the beginning of the pandemic, but he could still access YouTube. And he could still do some of his exercises, you know, with YouTube. But I think the thing that stands out to me most is that every, as people get older, it's really important for some people to have something to look forward to, to stay connected with other people to figure out how they're making a contribution, and to have something that they look forward to, from one day to the next. And the way that impacted me personally, is that my parents and I went on a trip at the beginning of the year, the end of 2021. In the beginning of this year, my parents just had a lift installed on the back of their new van so they can transport my father's scooter more easily, because their independence matters to them. But we've tried to figure out how can technology help us with that, and then we'll go on another trip another family trip together this summer, because I know that they have to have something they're looking forward to. And it's so funny, they just came back for two trips, and I asked them I was like, So what's next? What are you looking forward to next? They say, Oh, well, at the end of the month, we both have colonoscopy.

Margaret Lamar, PhD

24:41

What you're looking forward to when you're older, it definitely changes. I think what I look forward to now, as opposed to you know, when I was in my 20s is a lot different. Yeah. Yeah.

Savitri Dixon-Saxon, PhD

24:53

But they have to have you know, they have to have something there. But there have been times where I have questioned whether or not they were exhausting themselves with their civic engagement, it's important to them, they are the kinds of people who, who define aging well as continuing to contribute to their community, and continuing to have something that they enjoy doing recreationally. That's their definition of it. And that's the other thing I've learned is that everybody doesn't define success at every stage in life, the way the next person might, because for some people, aging well is not to have to be very active, some people aging well means having the opportunity to sit down to be reflective, and not have to not feel compelled to do things all of the time. But the thing about it is we know socio economic status has a huge impact on whether or not people age well. socio economic status does socio demographic variables, like whether or not, you know, we know that one of the things we discussed in our chapter is that there is variability and how people of color access health care, preventative health care, in comparison to other groups. So we know, you know, an ounce of prevention, of course, is worth a pound of cure, and you see a disproportional numbers of people who are people of color or people who are poor, who are who deal with chronic illness on a daily basis, because they haven't had access to not just preventative health care, they haven't had access to strong school systems that educated the providing that education, about health that they needed. They didn't have open recreational spaces in their communities where they could walk and get exercise and fresh air. Many of them live in places that are food deserts. So the kid access for us fresh fruits and vegetables very easily. And all of those things impact how a person ages.

Margaret Lamar, PhD

27:25

I'm also curious about, you know, how much we're seeing folks or in that age range, accessing mental health or, you know, another thing I think about a lot is how we've seen in a move away from training counselors to, you know, very specifically with information about older adulthood, and, you know, what are, what are the mental health needs that they have? Are those folks accessing counseling? How can counselors be prepared to work with that age group?

Savitri Dixon-Saxon, PhD

28:01

Well, first of all, I will say this, I hope that we have written something that was compelling enough, in those chapters about older adulthood that will entice people to want to work with the older population, I truly do. Because the needs are significant there. I think, you know, when I think about, my parents have gotten most of their support for their mental health. It's been from the general practitioners, but but there's a shortage of people who are really willing to work with the geriatric population, because it's not seen as attractive as other groups. And what we all have to do as helpers is help people start understanding where did you get these images from? Where did you, you know, what happens to all of us the reason we think that it's not as glamorous to work with the older population is that if you, I will tell you something, I used to tell people when my daughter was younger, I taught her things that were going to be important to her later, before they mattered to her. So she learned about sex. She learned about alcohol and other drugs much earlier than a lot of people would tell their children about those things. But I was trying to shape her values about those things before she got to a point where she was confronted with making decisions about those things, right. So the idea is before it is salient to you, I'm trying to give you an understanding of these things. And because she wasn't heavily invested, she didn't feel a need to push back against what I was saying, right? Well, well, we're younger, our cartoons or music, or magazines all around us. We're getting these mess suggests that it is not as attractive to be older, that older people are grumpy, or they don't, they're not value added, or all they are is people that we have to take care of. They don't add anything to the family unit we've learned that our entire lives about and we start to learn that message before it salient to us as individuals. So we don't have a need to fight against the messages we're hearing. We take those stereotypes in. And then when we get to be older, and it is salient. Now we have like a lifetime of negative messages that we've never challenged about what it means to be older. So for those young people who are going into the profession, and even people who are older people, we don't see it as being as interesting because we don't know of all of the interesting aspects. There are two older people's lives we think that they themselves are not people we want to be associated with or want to be around. And I think that we really have to, we want I hope that we will encourage training counselors to really think about serving this population. And I hope that will also provide an avenue for those who may not get it while they're initially in a training program, the opportunity to come back to us to find out how to serve that population. Well, it's a need for a lot of reasons. We're Unity's where we were people who stayed in our communities of origin and we had extended families all around us. And there was a more collectivist culture, people supported their elderly in a different way. And you saw people who you know, I think about I grew up with this show that you may not be familiar with called The Waltons. And the waters were an intergenerational household. And it seemed like the most natural thing in the world, for the grandparents to be living in the home with the parents who were raising their children. I lived in a very small community, and it was very, we have very interdependent relationships with my grandparents. My father oftentimes jokes that the very first bed I ever slept in was my grandparents bed because my mother was very ill when she had me. And I had to stay with my grandparents for a short while. Um, and I was always attached to them as a matter I mean, always attached to them. So the idea of caring for them, when they were older, was something a message I just got from my community. When my grandmother was terminally ill My grandparents had my maternal grandparents had nine children, my paternal grandparents had six. And when my grandmother, we found out my grandmother was terminally ill, she was in a hospital only about 30 miles from where I live now. So while it was a longer commute for the rest of my family to get to her at this hospital, it didn't take much at all for me to get there. And she said to me one day, she said, I am so rich, rich, how she rich, this is someone who raised she and my grandfather raised much of their family as sharecroppers, but what she meant by that was, all of her children were literally vying for the opportunity to be there with her and care for her. And so were her grandchildren. What we're faced with now is, you know, as society became more and more industrialized, people moved away from those rural communities into larger communities where they had less support, right. And they weren't just leaving behind their support systems. They were leaving behind those people who might need them now. So almost every group of people I talked to in my generation who are being confronted with their aging parents, everybody's trying to figure out how do I navigate the life I've built outside of my community of origin and provide my parents with the support they may need as elderly people. But I will tell you, interestingly enough, the people in rural communities tend to be happier as they age, then people in urban communities and urban communities have more support for that. they're elderly. But rural communities have more opportunities for personalized connection.

Margaret Lamar, PhD

35:09

Yeah, so fascinating. And what a great relationship with your grandparents and being able to foster that. So I want to transition a bit and talk about emerging adulthood. First, if you could tell us, you know, I kind of came up with the early adulthood phrasing. And so what is that shift to emerging adulthood? And then, you know, again, we're just, I'm here for the tips. So you said you had learned a lot about how you're communicating and how you, you know, relate to your daughter and your nieces who are in that emerging adulthood phase. And so if you could share all of your tips and tricks with us, that would be lovely. Well, listen

Savitri Dixon-Saxon, PhD

35:53

to this, it's a short cut it I will say to you abandon all of those musts and shoulds, about people who were in their late teens and early 20s. That's the That's what our net said, in the end of the 20th century, what he started to notice was that those young those people in that place between 18 and 25, were appearing very different in industrial societies. And they were not making the commitment to things that previous that people between 18 and 25 previous generations had. And this really resonated with me because I noticed that there was a huge difference between me as a person who went to college, and my friends who had not gone to college and went to work shortly after high school. And in my mind, they seem to be more mature than I was because many of them got married in their late teens, early 20s, and had children and had homes of their own and had life insurance. And all of these things that I was like, wow,

Unknown Speaker

37:19

the mark of adulthood life insurance,

Savitri Dixon-Saxon, PhD

37:22

I was priding myself on the fact that I could pack up and leave wherever I was living in a day, because I didn't even need a U haul. And I remember, I remember actually grieving the purchase of my first sofa, and dining room table, because it meant that I didn't have the same flexibility I had had before I that was really hard for me. But because we have a generation of people who, after high school, many of whom go on to college or go off for some more career training. We, we consequently have been a generation of people who are prolonging committing to relationships, committing to parenthood, committing to living in a place, you know, my own daughter will return home for the summer. And this is the part this is very much a part of that season of life. You know, this will be hopefully the first of the last three summers she spends? I say that jokingly. But the reality is that emerging adulthood is this time of very low commitment in those roles that we typically think of as adult roles. And oftentimes, we see that people in this generation are, it's really interesting, because they still have strong ties to their families financially, but they can make adult decisions. So I have great appreciation for this. Because what I'm seeing is that, you know, a lot of people would think my own parents got married at 22 years old, you know, and when we think of someone getting married at 22, now we're like, who they got married early. I have a colleague whose daughters getting married this summer, she's 21. And that's all I could do to keep my mouth shut because I'm like, whoa, whoa. You know, I can't imagine that. Two years, two years from now, but what we find is that there there is, it's almost like living in two worlds for this group of people. I used you know, if you can imagine it, you have all the rights and responsibilities of being an adult, but you don't have the resources to really be an They'll or you haven't made that commitment fully. And you see generations or groups of people who can be very impatient with people during this time, you know, but it is, I think what I find for myself, I've decided where my daughter and my nieces are concerned, I'm gonna as they will, they don't say, my generation was I'm gonna take a chill pill, you know, I'm gonna see how this shapes up and give them an opportunity to explore a lot because that it is a high exploration time period. And you know, in in the book I discuss both belong and mystic to African Americans in their I call them on the cusp, because really, they're leaving emerging adulthood and really trying to get into early adulthood. But what we have to consider is there all kinds of things that impact a person's ability to move from that place of exploration to commitment, you know, and I was just, I was just telling someone that, you know, at my age, I'm still at a place where I'm trying to figure out where the next phase of my career will go. And what I'm finding is that even though I've done well, in my career, I'm just a tad bit behind my white colleagues, who may have done the same kinds of things like maybe a year or two years behind, because the reality is that culture and context can impact people's ability to resolve those crises at each stage of development. And so that's part of what I try to explore with mystic and Bilaal is that, you know, both culture and context are impacting their ability to move on to early adulthood because Bilal is very well educated with two undergraduate degrees, which is really interesting, because it goes back to what I say about mentorship and role modeling being important, because he could have made the same investment of time and have an undergraduate and master's degree. But what he knows is just to get educated, so he gets two undergraduate degrees, but he's still not gainfully employed from his perspective. And it's interesting, because it's only when he is able to role model for other people and access role models, is he able to start kind of putting these pieces together to start transitioning into early adulthood. But I think it's so important for us to really think about how the socio cultural environment impacts development. And this is why I say this whole, you know, when we think about the context of young people now, in addition to being at a place where pandemic is more manageable, um, they are also they have also borne witness to a significant crisis, human rights crisis in America, but now, on the world stage, they have seen it in a way that previous generations have never been up close to civil unrest, human rights violations, they no other generation has had access to as much information as this group has had. They have access to social media all the time. And we're not prepared to teach them how to critically analyze all the information they're taking in. And that's their context.

Speaker 2

44:10

And I suspect, the root of their trauma.

Savitri Dixon-Saxon, PhD

44:16

And so what will that mean about their ability to take on adult, what we see as adult responsibilities? What does it mean about their committed ability to commit to relationships, to commit to, you know, staying in place, commit to professions commit to a spiritual identity? What impact will it have? Because what I hear when I talk to people in this generation, is that there is a sense of being at the end, the end of time, almost, you know, and it's interesting, because last week, I started adopting this term, every time I see something that It was kind of amazing. I go, Yep, we're at the middle of the end, as opposed to the beginning of it. You know? And so we're going to have to figure out how do we instill in this, because I'm not the first group to feel like that every group that dealt with, you know, that dealt with the threat of every generation that dealt with the threat of nuclear war, felt like that, as you know, in the atomic bomb, every every generation has had that thing that made them feel like maybe things were hopeless, but they also had that transition to feeling like, maybe I can contribute to it not being hopeless, or what is the contribution I made? to that?

Margaret Lamar, PhD

45:45

Yeah, I think that's so interesting. And I was going to ask, you know, I think a lot of times, as you know, we get older, we kind of look back at newer generations and say, like, oh, you know, back in my day, or, you know, or this seems like, this is really, you know, the end of, of, you know, this generation, like, you know, the Oh, social media, or whatever else people are getting into. And so I think, you know, when you look back, though, that there are maybe other similarities to other generations. And so I do wonder, your thought about like, has development fundamentally changed? Is it fundamentally changing for those younger generations? Or are we seeing similar patterns replay themselves over and over again?

Savitri Dixon-Saxon, PhD

46:30

Well, they're all I don't think that you can ever discount the socio cultural context. When we think about how Levingston defined the dream, when, you know, first he focused on men, then he started focusing on women, and but when he focused on women and their dream, it was still in reference to men, you know. And so we live in a society where women have far more choices. I don't know whether or not we're going to change, you know, what will happen with that. But right now, we have a lot more choices about being financially dependent, independent, we have choices, different choices than previous generations about reproductive rights, all of those things have an impact on how you see how people develop and when, and where they get a win, they get to places in their developmental identity. Right. So I don't think that it's exactly the same. But I think that there are the which is why I don't think I think it's so important for us to really think about development from the perspective of contemporary society. But there are some things that will never change, which is why you never abandon what you understand about, you know, traditional theory, people will always want to access love, people will always need to be able to find a way to take care of themselves, people will always need to know how to relate to other groups, and to move to places of being of being productive and creative. People will always have those needs, they will always need to feel like they are making some contribution. That is a human condition. You know, but what will be different, those things that shape are developed development and make a difference is all about context, resources, our access to information, you know, all of those things will have an impact on it. The fact that all the options we have in our lives now as women in comparison to 100 years ago, have an impact on how we develop.

Unknown Speaker

49:06

Yeah, that's a great example. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker

49:10

Well, I,

Margaret Lamar, PhD

49:12

what other parting words about lifespan, development or human development? Would you want to leave us with

Savitri Dixon-Saxon, PhD

49:22

I will tell you having the opportunity to bear witness to the process of writing, communicating with my co authors, and just being reminded about how fascinating human beings are, and how awesome it is to have an opportunity to study their development. I hope that I hope that something about my conversation inspires that passion in someone else or gives them gives voice to that path. Shouldn't they didn't know because I just, I don't think that I think that this area of study and counseling will never grow old, I think there will always be something new to uncover. And I just want every person who listens to this or every student, to just commit to a lifetime of learning about people, and commit to always being the kind of person who is open to people being experts in their lives and allowing them to inform you about what matters to them, what resources they have, and what they need.

Margaret Lamar, PhD

50:44

Well, I got I feel so inspired and motivated to go learn more about this to read your book. And I've got it on pre order. I'm, I'm very excited. Thank you so much for sharing your passion around this today. hearing your experiences has been so moving. So thank you, Dr. Dixon, Saxon for being with us today.

Savitri Dixon-Saxon, PhD

51:10

Thank you so much for inviting me for being such a generous and gracious listener. I appreciate you. Yeah,

Unknown Speaker

51:16

thank you.

Speaker 1

51:32

Thanks again for tuning into the thoughtful counselor today. We hope you enjoyed the show. This podcast is made possible through our partnership with concept, Palo Alto University's Division of Continuing and Professional Studies. Learn more about the thoughtful counselor and some of the other amazing continuing education offerings provided by concept at Palo Alto you.edu forward slash concept. As always, if you are a fan of the show, we would love to hear your feedback and review on Apple podcasts or wherever you subscribe

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