Elf Sternberg

Warning, they may be a bit disjointed.

On stages, of grief, development, or whatever. I think the guidelines, or definitions of the stages that these folks have come up with are basically true. What most people fail to recognize, though, is that these stages take differing amounts of time for each individual; yes most will take a similar amount of time for one stage, but there are still variants. Also, what a stage looks like from one person to another will vary as well.

As to childhood socializing I have very personal experience there. Most of my first 6-8 years was spent in hospitals (and a few years after kinda hermiting), therefore my early social training consisted of learning how to be a good girl and pleasing authority figures, and rejecting my natural urges to deny people the right to mess with my body. Meanwhile I missed out on learning to get along with my peer group; missed out on how to make friends; missed out on learning all those millions of little body language and social cue things that most people take for granted. It's in those early years that you learn those things, which is why children keep forming and reforming social groups. It's been extremely difficult for me to learn these things when starting from age 10-ish and I still make mistakes these days about social things that people would expect me to just know. So yah, whether it follows a proscribed pattern or not, those early years are extremely important for a child to learn how to function in basic society.