HEALTH AND WELLBEING.
Through the Lifespan. Throughout our lives we have windows in our development that present us with opportunities for growth and development. They are transitional periods where we are moving from thoughts, behaviours, feelings, habits and physical movements, into others. Many of the critical windows that we experience in our lives occur during our childhood years, and then again during adolescence. These are times of a particular sensitivity and significance.
Each phase of our growth and development is cyclical and each cycle will feed into the next. In this way part of what we learn in childhood, will carry us through into adolescence, in turn carrying us through into adulthood. In women, the hormonal learning and modelling that occurs during adolescence prepares our bodies for the hormonal changes of pregnancy and childbirth, and thus this phase will then lay the foundation for the changes we experience in pre-menopause and menopause. This is a dynamic and layered process, somethings we learn in childhood, we will carry with us and somethings we will relearn and unlearn.
During these critical windows the cells of the body and brain demonstrate an increased propensity to make change, referred scientifically as plasticity. The capacity for change within the body and brain is greatest in childhood and continues to a lesser extent throughout our lives. Previously underrecognised within scientific and medical literature is the developmental windows that occur for women and reproductive persons in the transition into mothering and caregiving and again later in menopause. It has been demonstrated only relatively recently that there exists specific type of plasticity that is inherent to reproduction itself and that there are also structural changes to the brain and body that occur during menopause.
These changes are characterised cellularly as a time of increased opportunity to facilitate adaptions to new environments and life situations, and for parents to care for their young, yet conversely these cellular moderations can cause a degree of body wide volatility.
Bringing an awareness and an understanding to the fragilities and the opportunities that these transitional periods evoke are key to providing more compassion and deeper levels of care at these impressionable periods of time and allows us to see how development is non linear.
24. Oct. 2024.
References and Further Reading.
The Mothers Modern Manual, this article contains excerpts from.
McKay, Dr Sarah 2018, Demystifying the female brain. Orion Spring, London
