Rather than purely focusing on a child's sexual or neurological stages of development, like Freud and Piaget, Erik Erikson attempted to present a more holistic model for analyzing childhood development ("Piaget's Stages of Social-Emotional Development In Children and Teenagers,"1998, Child Development Institute). Erkison's approach is uniquely helpful for educators today. Erikson "describes the physical, emotional and psychological stages of development and relates specific issues, or developmental work or tasks, to each stage" (Patient Teaching, Loose Leaf Library: Springhouse Corporation, 1990). Ultimately childhood education is about setting tasks-setting tasks for the student to complete to facilitate understanding, and setting tasks for the teacher to become a quality educator.
             Erikson called the full range of his stages "eight stages of man" (or human being), taking his cue from Shakespeare's famous "All the world's a stage" speech, which reflects the many roles and conflicts human beings engage in over the course of their individual lives. Erikson's literary bent shows that his theories were formulated, not through experimental work like Piaget, but through his wide - ranging experience in psychotherapy, "including extensive experience with children and adolescents from low - as well as upper - and middle - social classes"("Stages of Social-Emotional Development In Children and Teenagers,"1998, Child Development Institute).
             Like Freud, Erikson viewed each stage of development as a crisis, but not a purely psychological or personal crisis confined to the family environment or pertaining to sexuality (Wagner, 2007). Erikson coined the term to describe these struggles as a series of "psychosocial crisis" points, each of which arises and demands resolution. A child may progress to the next developmental stage, but insufficient r...