Angelou Life Span Development Developmental

Angelou

life Span Development

Developmental analysis: Biological and social explanations for Maya Angelou's resilience

Developmental analysis: Biological and social explanations for Maya Angelou's resilience

As a young woman, the poet, dancer, and intellectual Maya Angelou faced seemingly impossible odds. She grew up in an era where discrimination against African-Americans was still widely tolerated. Angelou was raised in a broken home when divorce was still looked down upon, and at age eight, "she was raped by her mother's boyfriend, who was subsequently killed by her uncles. The event caused the young girl to go mute for nearly six years, and her teens and early twenties were spent as a dancer, filled with isolation and experimentation" (Biography, 2010). At age sixteen, falling into a pattern common with many girls who are the victims of abuse, she gave birth to a son shortly before her high school graduation.

However, Angelou showed remarkable resilience. She began working as a professional dancer, became involved in black activism and "spent several years in Ghana as editor of African Review, where she began to take her life, her activism and her writing more seriously," eventually becoming a famous poet, lecturer, and writer (Biography, 2010). Despite environmental obstacles, she showed great social competence under "challenging circumstances. Social competence is defined broadly as the ability to select and pursue desired, attainable goals by achieving control over one's actions and emotions by understanding, connecting with, and influencing other people" (Ewart et al. 2002, p. 328). Angelou was able to use the opportunities presented by her arts high school, by the growing wave of Pan-Africanism and the American Civil Rights movement to find mentors for her literary aspirations.

However, finding such inner reserves is at least partially dependant upon others: "success in achieving one's goals usually depends in some measure on the actions of other people, and thus demands skill in forming supportive relationships" (Ewart et al. 2002, p. 328). Social learning, or learning norms of behavior from others, is often deemed an essential aspect of childhood development. The familial norms to which Angelou was exposed to were largely dysfunctional. However, a social expectation theorist of personality might state that Angelou did have positive influences in her life, including her experiences at an exclusive arts high school, the opportunity to find fulfilling employment in Africa, and then the historically fortunate occurrence of being able locate her struggles in a larger context of the Civil Rights movement. A mixture of innate talents and supportive relationships resulted in achievement and resiliency. Social learning theory suggests that resiliency, and the ability to turn negatives into positives, such as Angelou's use of her difficult life as a source for literary autobiography and poetry, is not biologically based, but depends upon being exposed to social opportunities and the willingness of others to develop the subject's natural gifts.

But this ability to 'mine' her life's challenges may itself be partially due to a biological stress response that is more productive for individuals such as Angelou than other individuals. Resilience does not so much imply an invulnerability to stress, but rather an ability to recover from negative events: "Considerable data exists suggesting that young people functioning well under high stress often show higher levels of emotional distress compared to their low stress peers" (Olsson et al. 2003, p.3). In other words, a natural invulnerability to stress is not characteristic of resiliency so much as being able to function well under high stress levels.