Human Growth and Development / Unit 16 HGD 2298 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Selection, Optimization and Compensation
The idea
Paul Baltes proposed that successful aging uses three strategies. Selection is narrowing to the most meaningful activities and goals. Optimization is practising and investing more in those chosen activities. Compensation is using assistive devices, help or new strategies to offset losses. The pianist Arthur Rubinstein, at eighty, played fewer pieces, practised them more, and slowed before fast passages so they sounded faster by contrast: selection, optimization and compensation.
In practice
A seventy-eight-year-old gardener who gives up the vegetable plot to focus on roses, tends them daily, and uses a kneeling stool and long-handled tools.
Where people slip
Exam items describe an adaptation and ask for the strategy: narrowing is selection, practice is optimization, and aids or workarounds are compensation. In the fourth age, around ninety and beyond, losses become harder to manage with these strategies.
Your place on the trail
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