A person is said to be developing when they are undergoing growth and becoming more mature. This is an ongoing process that can happen throughout life. Development is often a result of life events, and it may be a natural part of aging or it may be a response to changes in the environment. People can be developing in a variety of ways, including in their relationships, careers, and health.
It is important to remember that development is a social and cultural phenomenon, so the characteristics of development will be different depending on the context in which it occurs. For example, an individual’s experience of adolescence might be very different from another person’s in that one culture, but the general process might be the same. This is why it is important to understand that although there are many similarities between cultures in terms of human development, much of what we know about the process remains culturally bound and difficult to apply across cultures.
The idea that development is emergent property of a system is quite challenging for the field of developmental psychology because it runs counter to the traditional understanding of development as a set of predictable stages that begin at infancy and end with adulthood. It also reveals that the most pressing development problems are not the poverty and war that we normally focus on, but rather the lack of conditions for people to develop according to their potential in all aspects of their lives.