Lifespan Development: Cultural and Contextual Applications for the Helping Professions

Kelly Coker, PhD, LCMHC, NCC, BC-TMH, is a cis-gender white female in midlife. She is a professor and associate chair of the counseling program at Palo Alto University. She is also a fierce and loyal wife, mother, sister, daughter, and aunt. Kelly has been a counselor educator for more years than she can count, and as part of this work has published and presented a lot. She loves nothing more than training emerging counselors how to be their best selves, how to work with humility and compassion, and how to always strive to meet their clients where they are. As a licensed clinical mental health counselor (LCMHC) and Board-certified Tele-Mental health counselor, Kelly works with a small handful of clients in a tele-mental health private practice. She is amazed by how often consideration of phases of life enters into her work. It is for this reason that Kelly wanted to engage in this exciting project with three other warrior women. She would love to hear from you, students and educators, about how this book informs your learning, your clinical work, and your understanding of self.

Kristi B. Cannon, PhD, LPC, NCC, is a cis-gender, white female straddling the lines of early and middle adulthood―feeling a foot firmly planted in each camp and the associated lack of balance this causes nearly every day. She is a counselor educator, licensed professional counselor, and current Director of Counseling Programs at Southern New Hampshire University. Inspired, first and foremost, by the infinite curiosity, wisdom, and beautiful insight of the early and middle childhood years―those associated with her precious three daughters―Kristi has also spent considerable time specializing in clinical work with adolescents and women's infertility issues. Her passion for this project came out of a desire to better reflect the meaningful variations in life experiences she witnessed in her community and clinical practice and ones not often or frequently-enough named in graduate textbooks. As a woman of significant unearned privilege, it is her goal to continue learning and challenging herself every day so that she may be a better partner, parent, friend, ally, counselor, educator, and human. Her collaboration with the amazing women on this project has certainly contributed, and she hopes that you take some of this away from this book as well.

Savitri V. Dixon-Saxon, PhD, LCMHC, is a cis-gender female and African American single mother, daughter, sister, and friend (her most important intersecting identities). Her roles as the mother to an emerging adult and daughter to parents in late adulthood have fueled her passion for this book. Through workshops, speaking engagements, and articles, Savitri has provided her expertise on a variety of topics related to diversity, grief, positive body-image, single-parenthood, and intergenerational workplace dynamics. A counselor educator and licensed clinical mental health counselor, she has a thirty-year career in higher education in student and academic affairs and is currently a Vice Provost at Walden University providing oversight to the Colleges of Nursing, Social and Behavioral Health, and Allied Health. She is grateful for what she has learned from this co-author sisterhood and listening to the experts who have provided their perspectives from the field. It is her hope that readers will commit to a lifetime of learning because people and society are dynamic and require constant study. She is also hopeful that more helpers will embrace working with those in late adulthood. They have so much wisdom to offer.

Karen M. Roller, PhD, MFT, is a cis-het, white, temporarily able-bodied tomboy whose body increasingly reminds her she is now in midlife. Born into the middle class and raised Catholic, she aims to retain the service orientation of that tradition's true Teachers while she spends her adult pennies traveling the inhabited world unlearning the colonial aspects of it and learning how the rest of the world embodies connection with the Divine; this makes her a yogic Sufi with an environmental conservation bent. She is an associate professor of counseling at Palo Alto University, and clinical coordinator at Family Connections, a parent-involvement preschool serving low-resource migrant families in the San Francisco Bay Area. As a bilingual marriage and family therapist and supervisor who has been primarily field-based, she has spent a lot of years facilitating sessions in tri- and quad-generational homes, foster homes, hospitals, and community-based settings; this has made her a trauma-informed, cross-cultural attachment nerd. Humbled by the impact of how oppression, cultures, and quality of caregiving relationships inform the sense of self across the lifespan, she has been blessed to learn from babies, children, teens, and adults through each phase of life to death. She is a fortunate daughter, sister, grandchild, niece, cousin, co-worker, friend, and (now most importantly) mom. Collaborating with this wise and inspiring writing sisterhood has enlivened her to more deeply embrace what life may send her way.