Adding life to one’s added years: Self- regulatory balancing of life domains across old age

Abstract

As life-span developmental psychologists, our research programs focus on the description, explanation, and optimization of human behavior and development (e.g., Baltes, Reese, & Nesselroade, 1977; Lerner, 2012). Traditionally, this work adopts an action-theoretical accounting of the basic processes for human development (Brandtstadter & Lerner, 1999) arguing that in addition to biological and environmental factors, people are the active producers of their own development (Lerner & Busch-Rossnagel, 1981), creating their futures through setting and striving for goals. For decades, life-span developmental psychologists and life course sociologists have fruitfully conversed and collaborated to push their fields forward, developing research projects, applied programs, and supporting policies that have improved lives and our understanding of how they unfold. We hope that our comments on the commendable target article by Bernardi, Huinink, and Settersten (2018; this issue) contribute to this decades-long productive conversation across academic disciplines. Our goal here is to complicate a portion of the target article that focuses on interdependencies across life domains (e.g., work, family, education). We do so by introducing a new “wrinkle:” life-span developmental psychology’s perspectives on successful aging (e.g., Freund, 2008). In short, we argue that the lack of social norms that characterize aging populations provide older adults with a (1) significant challenge to their self-regulatory capacity, but also (2) a significant opportunity — that is arguably unique across the life span — to actively define and select domains in life to support their successful aging. Therefore, the interdependency of life domains in older adulthood may represent a special case that expands and further enriches the Life Course Cube model (Bernardi, Huinink, & Settersten, this issue).