Psychology of Childhood and Adolescence in an Urban Context

For the past 5 years (including this year) I have lifeguarded at a private pool. It is filled with many old people but we do get a few children coming through. One of the children that has been coming there even before I started working there is an autistic boy named Austin. I have watched him grow up from being scared of even going near the water, to just splashing around with a vest on to taking off the vest and jumping in the deep end by himself. While taking this class a lot of the things we talked about reminded me of things that Austin did.

One of the things we mentioned is that children can’t tell depth and we saw an example of this when the child was crawling over the glass but for all they knew there could have been nothing there and they would have fallen. Austin did the same thing. He used to run from the shallow end of the pool to the deep end and just run off the edge (before he could swim) not realizing that there is no floor and that he was jumping into six feet of water. I also saw this in another autistic boy there as well as a two year old girl. They had no fear and just went right in. the second autistic boy Peirce walked off the stairs not realizing the last step was very high and he was too short and couldn’t reach the bottom.

It surprised me how much of the things that we listed in class fit the children at the pool for being fearless, not having a care in the world (screaming not caring that people are around, running around) exploring the world around them, adapting to the world around them (you want to be in the pool you learn to swim), innocence (no matter how annoying or bad things they did they were innocent because they didn’t know better) and many other things. I was also able to see how children were affected by their surroundings. I have had people who were very snobby and uptight and their children ages 3-5 were just like them, wanting all the attention and doing what they want while they disregarded rules. Then there were those who got affected by their surroundings realizing that the people around them were older and just sitting in lounges not making noise or just swimming for a short time and then laying down. These children would mimic the adults and stayed quiet most of the time.