This movie-The Blind Side talks about how Michael Oher achieved his self-esteem during his adolescent time. Between the plots of the movie, we also included some development theories such as Erik Erikson’s psychosocial cognitive theory; Maslow’s hierarchy needs theory and also the operant conditioning theory that associated with Michael’s development.

As an introduction, Michael Oher was a famous Black American football player that came from a poor family that consist of thirteen children, an absentee father and an alcoholic plus drug addict mother in the village of Memphis, Tennessee (Bell, 2009). In Michael’s childhood, he did not enjoy any love or caring from his parent as both of them do not want to be in charge of him and the …show more content…

According to the reinforcement theory, positive reinforcement increases the tendency to respond as family members, school teacher’s support are causing Michael to work harder in school (Nairne, 2009). Because of the changes made by the Tuohy’s family in Michael’s life, he developed a sense of love and belongingness needs to his adopted family members. The event happened can be explained by the theory of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. He reached the third stage of need which is love need since he already achieved the first two stages of needs which are the physiological and safety need. (Norwood, 2009). Because of the sense of belongingness, Michael seems to be a very protective person where he even injured his right arm in a car accident in order to avoid the smaller sized Sean Junior from getting injured by the air bags’ pressure which might broke Sean Junior’s spinal cord. Although the accident was caused by Michael’s carelessness in driving, but his quick reaction saved Sean Junior’s life and this made Anne to console him instead of blaming him. After this incident, Michael relationship becomes closer to his adopted family and he promised to always protect them. The protective characteristics also helps Michael to boosts his motivation and passion towards football later in the movie plots.

After achieve the sense of love and belongingness, Michael agrees to join