All living things have needs. Whether the needs be as basic as food or as complex as discovering the reason for existence, all organisms have them. Maslow wrote that, beyond the basic needs for water, food, shelter, and the like, peoples needs are for safety, belongingness and identification, for close love relationships, and for respect and prestige. In a way, we all strive to fulfill these needs at some point in our lives. For example, in order to satisfy the need for safety, human beings live together in a society with laws that, if broken, have undesirable consequences attached. Most people also have friends and family throughout their lives to satisfy the need for close love relationships. As people grow older, they will, at least at some point, try to fulfill this need through a relationship with a significant other. One human need at all age levels and one that is recognized by Maslow is the need for belongingness or acceptance by ones peers. However, the way people become accepted is harder to determine than the other needs. How do individuals come to be accepted by their peers? One approach to gaining acceptance is by knowing the essential cultural knowledge common to your peers. This essential cultural knowledge changes as we grow older in order to better suit the maturity level of our peers, and gain the acceptance we all long for.Many people agree that, in most cases, as we grow older, our maturity level grows as well. One way of measuring the maturity level of children is by seeing the way a child responds to authority. Mature children will respect authority, be well mannered to some degree, and know the difference between right and wrong even if they dont always choose right. Children, in general, respond more to a reward and punishment decision-making system than they do to an ethical approach to making judgments. The maturity level for adults is measured in a different way than it is for children. A ma...
