Stan Lee

I had trouble thinking of someone notable who I would not only be able to find a biography on, but also a person that I would enjoy reading a biography about. However, I have finally landed on a biography of Stan Lee, the man who made Marvel one of the biggest names in modern American culture. The title of the Biography is “Stan Lee: The Man Behind Marvel” which covers his upbringing in depression era America and chronicles his life events and accomplishments. One major developmental theory I would like to include in this project is the Nature vs Nurture theory. Stan Lee grew up in depression era America but became one of the most influential men of modern times. I believe that Nature/Nurture debate would be a great fit for this project.

When it comes to lifespan development, there is one debate that stands above the rest as a major issue: nature/nurture debate. The nature/nurture debate covers the question of what decides human developmental outcomes: nature which covers biological traits, or nurture which covers environmental traits (Berk, 2018). For the most part, the various theories that exist on human development grant credit to both sides of this debate, however, the difference between the theories is the emphasis it places on one side or the other (Berk, 2018).

Stan Lee grew up in Depression Era America. His parents were immigrants who move to the United States to seek a better life (Batchelor, 2017). When it comes to Stan Lee’s prenatal development, the fact that he was born to immigrant parents is important. According to various research studies, children living in immigrant families and communities have superior socio-emotional functioning (Desmond & Kubrin, 2009; Georgiades et al., 2007; Roosa et al., 2009, as cited in Leventhal & Shuey, 2014) but remain inferior when it comes to achievement-related outcomes (Bygren & Szulkin, 2010, as cited in Leventhal & Shuey, 2014).

Stan Lee’s prenatal life consisted of a high-stress fetal environment as his mother had to endure the major stressors of low socioeconomic status, working while pregnant, and living in less fortunate communities that were commonplace for immigrant families and communities (Batchelor, 2017). When it comes to prenatal stress, we know that stressors such as low socioeconomic status, teratogens, and life stress are all related to birth and developmental outcomes such as cardiovascular health, disease risk, cognitive and motor functioning, and more both prenatally and postnatally (Entringer, Buss, & Wadhwa, 2015; Grace, Bulsara, Robinson, & Hands, 2015; & Lefmann, Combs-Orme, & Orme, 2017).

His childhood years were relatively normal until about seven years of age. Stan Lee lived in a low socioeconomic area that was filled with mostly immigrant families like his own. This led to a close-knit community life filled with support from others (Batchelor, 2017). His father was more authoritarian than anything else with a “do as I say, not as I do” attitude, while his mother was more authoritative in that she expected Stan, and later on his younger brother, to both behave and be socially responsible, but she supported Stan in his education and personal interests (Batchelor, 2017).

All these factors fall under the nurture side of the nature/nurture debate as they are all non-biological environmental factors. While Stan’s family did have low socioeconomic status, their funds were relatively stable due to his father’s work as a dress-maker. When it came to parenting styles, Stan spent most of his free time with his authoritative mother, leading to his positive attitude towards social responsibility and well-balanced social-emotional development (Batchelor, 2017; Darling, 1999).

This leads us into Stan’s middle childhood which is a period classified as around 7 to 11 years of age. During this time, Stan and his family began going through one of the most difficult times in U.S. and world history, The Great Depression. It was during this time that Stan’s cognitive and social-emotional development began to skyrocket due to the circumstance in which he found himself (Batchelor, 2017). During this period of his life, Stan’s mother and father were going through a very difficult time financially and emotionally due to the loss of his father’s dressmaking job and later the arrival of Stan’s younger brother Lawrence, which stretched even further the limited funds they had to begin with.

Stan’s parents wanted desperately for Stan to finish school, as both knew that an education afforded Stan the best opportunity to improve his economic situation (Batchelor, 2017). However, this focus on education was also paired with a very realistic worldview that Stan would soon be able to hold part-time jobs to help support the financial burdens of the family. As such, his father, ever being the authoritarian parent, demanded that Stan finish school as soon as possible so that he would be able to find a good job and help support the family (Batchelor, 2017). This spurred on Stan’s cognitive development as Stan began to reach cognitive milestones much earlier than expected, such as concrete-operational thought being reached early in middle childhood.

According to Case (1996, 1998, as cited in Berk, 2018), the Piagetian stage of Concrete Operational though combines with the information processing theory (Munkata, 2006, as cited in Berk, 2018), resulting in a sort of snowball effect when it comes to cognitive development. As children use their limited cognitive schemes, those schemes become automatic, freeing up working memory to apply these old schemes in new ways to generate and develop new cognitive schemes. Furthermore, according to information processing theory, as children advance in executive functioning, such as self-regulation and control of attention, these functions begin to compound and make vital contributions to academic achievement.

When Case’s theory (1996, 1998, as cited in Berk, 2018) and further information processing theory (Munkata, 2006, as cited in Berk, 2018), are applied to Stan Lee’s middle childhood years, you can see that his cognitive development does follow the snowball effect in which, as he begins to use his executive functioning more often, his existing cognitive schemes are built up and new schemes are generated, resulting in greater academic achievement, which allows Stan to finish school faster not only in middle-childhood but also later on in adolescence Batchelor, 2017).

Next, we have Stan’s social-emotional development. As stated before, Stan’s early childhood was relatively normal. While he was classified as having low socioeconomic status, his family life, education, and funds were still relatively stable (Batchelor, 2017). According to Erikson (1950), because Stan’s early childhood had positive experiences of a loving family, community support structure, and (although low) stable finances, Stan entered middle childhood with realistic expectations. Erikson’s theory states that adult expectations, such as those set upon Stan by his mother and father, as well as Stan’s drive toward mastery (such as doing well in school), would lead Stan to develop useful skills such as self-understanding, self-esteem, and emotional competency.

Stan began to describe himself as funny, intelligent, good with words, and charismatic (Batchelor, 2017). All of which fall under social-emotional development and specifically, the description of his own self-concept, which results from social comparisons that Stan engages in between himself and his peers.

To further build on Stan’s social-emotional development, we have the concept of emotional self-regulation. During middle childhood, children engage in either problem-centered coping, which focuses on changing the problem, or emotion-centered coping, which focuses on dealing with the emotional distress internally (Kliewer, Fearnow, & Miller, 1996; Lazarus & Lazarus, 1994). During Stan’s middle-childhood, the Great Depression was in full swing, and Stan faced many emotional problems such as his parents’ constant fights about money, having to attend school with the pressure of potentially working part-time soon, and later having to help take care of his younger brother (Batchelor, 2017). Stan thus engaged in both problem-centered and emotion-centered coping strategies to self-regulate emotion and maintain his social-emotional development.

Stan’s adolescent phase was filled with academics and part-time jobs. From the support of his mother and demand placed on him by his father, Stan began to hold various part-time jobs to help support the family financially. However, his academic achievement didn’t suffer as he maintained solid grades through both middle and high school (Batchelor, 2017). This led to Stan finishing school early, and during his school years being younger than those others in the classroom (Batchelor, 2017).

During adolescence, individuals usually engage in increased risk-taking behaviors due to the increased presence of peers (and the social valuation that peers place on those behaviors) and decreased presence of parents (Smith, Chein, & Steinberg, 2013). For Stan, growing up in Depression-era America and being younger than his classmates, created a unique position in which certain risk-taking behaviors such as early sexual initiation, drinking, drugs, etc. did not occur. While the presence of his peers nurtured Stan’s showmanship and storytelling capabilities (Batchelor, 2017), his age created a wedge between his peer's risk-taking attitudes and himself. Furthermore, with his focus on part-time jobs due to his parents, and the ever-present influence of both his mother and father, decreased the likelihood of various risk-taking behaviors. This played well into Stan’s early graduation from high school and him finding his first real job at Timely Comics, the precursor to Marvel and the beginning of Stan Lee (Batchelor, 2017).

Stan was hired during late adolescence and into early adulthood and was a protégé of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, both of whom were older than Stan. His development during this time was focused mostly on emotional and social development (Berk, 2018), specifically the beginning of what would later become his career in publishing. During this time, Stan was mentored by both Simon and Kirby in what the publishing world was all about.

According to Levinson’s theory on life seasons (1978, 1996), when establishing a career an individual will create a dream of how they wish to be which guides decision making. Often an individual entering the workforce will be disappointed in the quality of work, co-workers, and financial compensation. By forming a mentor relationship with a friend, neighbor, or colleague, an individual will create a support structure to help realize their dream. For Stan, the mentor relationships with Simon and Kirby facilitated his transition from office errand boy to a full-blown team member of Marvel Comics (Batchelor, 2017) and launched his career in publishing.

For Stan Lee, diversity was the driving force in his life from his early days in small apartments with his family, to later in life with his own family and home. Various aspects of diversity such as socioeconomic status, ethnicity, culture, and gender all contributed to the way Stan Lee approached his daily life, his career, and his future (Batchelor, 2017). Stan Lee grew up and lived through the Great Depression as a child, participated in the war efforts during World War 2, and endured times of poverty and affluence (Batchelor, 2017).

As is commonly known about the 20th century America, society was very male-centric. For America, Stan included, being the man of the family means being the breadwinner and providing for the family. Due to the experiences of poverty that Stan endured as a child during the depression, he knew well the costs of not having a job (due to his father losing his job during the depression), and the physical and psychological consequences that comes with it (Batchelor, 2017). For instance, according to Bergen (2008), there is a significantly higher prevalence of neurobehavioral disorders for those individuals who live in poverty. For Stan, this was not a huge issue due to his incredible resilience and support from his friends and family.

Not only is diversity of people, places, and events an important aspect of development, but peoples influence on those people, places, and events are important as well (Berk, 2018).For Stan, the diverse settings in which he developed throughout his life (depression-era, war-time, poverty) and the people he interacted with (family, friends, coworkers) all helped to forge the path that Stan walked along, and the way that Stan interacted with these places and people determined the trajectory of Stans life. For example, had Stan not wholeheartedly dove into his early job at Timely comics, he may never have become the Editor-in-chief later in his career (Batchelor, 2017).

Furthermore, his experiences with living in poverty as a child, adolescent, and young adult, as well as his experiences and interactions with his father’s depression and anxiety over job loss, all helped to shape Stan’s vision of success: that having a job and maintain a job was important not only financially but for happiness and that a steady paycheck was most important (Batchelor, 2017).

For Stan Lee, his experiences early in life with family, friends, and other people around him helped to shape who he was. Growing up in depression-era America was a major developmental challenge as he was facing poverty, malnutrition, and educational deficiencies. However, despite the challenges, and lack of success early in his developmental life, Stan grew to make major changes in his own life that placed him on the path to success (Batchelor, 2017). From his experiences during World War 2 as a playwright for the U.S. Army, or his continued career at Timely working on comics and magazines as an editor and writer (both before, during, and after the war), Stan achieved his goal of a steady paycheck and what redefined his own definition of success (Batchelor, 2017).

References

Batchelor, B. (2017). Stan Lee: The man behind Marvel (Amazon Kindle E-Book). Lanham, MD: Rowan & Littlefield.

Bergen, D. C. (2008). Effects of poverty on cognitive function. Neurology, 71(6), 447-451. doi: https://doi.org/10.1212/01.wnl.0000324420.03960.36

Berk, L. E. (2018). Development through the lifespan (7th ed.). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Education.

Darling, N. (1999). Parenting style and its correlates. Retrieved from ERIC database. (ED427896)

Entringer, S., Buss, C., & Wadhwa, P. D. (2015). Prenatal stress, development, health and disease risk: A psychobiological perspective—2015 Curt Richter Award Paper. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 62, 366–375. doi:10.1016/j.psyneuen.2015.08.019

Erikson, E. H. (1950). Childhood and society. New York: Norton.

Grace, T., Bulsara, M., Robinson, M., & Hands, B. (2015). The impact of maternal gestational stress on motor development in late childhood and adolescence: A longitudinal study. Child Development, 87(1), 211–220. DOI: 10.1111/cdev.12449

Kliewer, W., Fearnow, M. D., & Miller, P. A. (1996). Coping socialization in middle childhood: Tests of maternal and paternal influences. Child Development, 67, 2339-2357. DOI: 10.2307/1131627

Lazarus, R. S., & Lazarus, B. N. (1994). Passion and reason. New York: Oxford University Press

Lefmann, T., Combs-Orme, T., & Orme, G. (2017) Examining the inter-correlated effects of low income, life stress, and race on birth outcomes: A representative state study. Social Work in Health Care, 56(6), 450-469. doi: 10.1080/00981389.2017.1316811

Leventhal, T., & Shuey, E. A. (2014). Neighborhood context and immigrant young children’s development. Developmental Psychology, 50(6), 1771–1787. https://doi-org.ezp.waldenulibrary.org/10.1037/a0036424

Levinson, D. J. (1978). The seasons of a man’s life. New York: Knopf

Levinson, D. J. (1996). The seasons of a woman’s life. New York: Knopf