Q.What are developmental tasks? Explain by giving examples.

Developmental tasks are the skills, behaviours, or achievements that a person is socially expected to accomplish during a particular stage of the life-span, since certain abilities are learned most easily and successfully during that specific period.

Human life proceeds through a sequence of developmental stages, each of which is treated as temporary and is characterised by a dominant or leading feature that gives it its own particular identity. Within any one stage, an individual is assumed to be progressing toward a particular, socially recognised goal — some ability or state they are expected to reach, in roughly the same order as everyone else, before they move on to the next stage in the sequence. Although individuals vary in the exact pace at which they move from one stage to another, certain patterns of behaviour and certain skills are, in practice, learned more easily and more successfully during specific stages of development than at other times.

These accomplishments — the abilities a person masters, or is expected to master, during a particular period of the life-span — become the social expectations attached to that stage of development, and this is precisely what is meant by developmental tasks.

Some concrete examples make this clearer. During infancy, developmental tasks include developing basic motor skills such as grasping and reaching for objects, sitting, crawling, walking and running, as well as forming a secure attachment with a caregiver. During childhood, developmental tasks include acquiring physical coordination and balance, developing logical thought, learning language, beginning to distinguish right from wrong (moral development), and building relationships within family and peer groups. During adolescence, the primary developmental task, according to Erikson, is establishing a personal identity separate from one's parents — alongside this, adolescents are also expected to work toward accepting their changing physical appearance, developing a sexual identity, and beginning to think about vocational choices. In early adulthood, developmental tasks include exploring the possibilities for adult living, choosing a career, and forming a stable life structure, often through marriage and parenthood. In old age, developmental tasks include adjusting to retirement, adapting to new family roles such as grandparenting, and coping with the challenges of illness, widowhood, and the deaths of loved ones.

Developmental tasks are useful because they show how 'what a person is expected to be able to do' shifts systematically across the life-span, and why the same behaviour (for instance, a strong dependence on parents) might be considered developmentally appropriate at one stage (infancy) but a developmental challenge at another (adolescence, where a degree of independence is instead expected).