Jean Piaget, a Swiss Psychologist, believed that a child’s mind develops through a series of four stages. These stages consist of the following:

• sensorimotor stage – birth to 2 years
• preoperational stage – 2 years to about 6 or 7 years
• concrete operational stage – 6 07 years to approximate 12 years
• formal operational stage – 12 years and through adulthood

Infants in the sensorimotor stage have no object permanance, or the awareness things continue to exist even when not perceived. If you place a teddy bear in front of a 5 month old, the child will grasp at it, put it in his mouth, and play with it. If you take the teddy bear away, the assumption is that the child will think it doesn’t exist. They will grab another toy that they do see.

Children in the preoperational stage begin to use language to describe things. This is the stage where the child begins to say their first words. These words are one syllable, such as ma or da. During this time, parents begin to watch what they say around their kids. Say a bad word, and it can get picked up by the child as children continue imitating what adults say and do.

However, they will tend to have problems understanding another person’s point-of-view, called egocentrism. Children during this stage also have problems with the concept of conservation. For example, if you have two beakers filled with water. Both beakers have the same amount of water. Take one of the beakers and empty it into a shorter, but wider beaker. Present these two beakers to the child and ask them if they have the same amount of water. In this age group, they will most likely say that the shorter, wider beaker has the more water. At this stage, they can’t fully grasp the concept of the change in shape doesn’t mean a change in volume. This is typical of children during the play years as this stage normally represents.

Once children are about 7 to 11 years of age, they tend to think more logically about concrete events. An obvious result of what they are learning in school. This stage is called the concrete operational stage and is also dubbed the school years.

Formal operational thinking is where children begin to think abstractly  and hypothetically. This begins at about 12 years old and continues throughout adulthood. This stage of thinking begins at about the junior high school level and progresses as they move through high school, college, and eventually graduate school. By the time the reach the college level, many students are beginning to master the art of metaphore and acronyms in their learning.

Piaget stated that children progressed through stages. Critics of Piaget say that children can progress more rapidly or slowly than the average child. For example, there have been cases of gifted children tend to be able to think and reason at an abtract, hypothetical level at age 9. Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development is meant to be a guidepost for a child’s development. It gives parents, educators, pediatricians, an idea of what milestones to be looking for at particular ages. Many pediatricians have been wise to tell parents not to worry if their child has failed to speak by a certain age. However, if a reasonable amount of time has passed without that milestone being reached, would be cause for concern.

Piaget believed that children of all ages are active thinkers who are constantly constructing their own knowledge. This came to be known as constructivism, or constructivist theory. Children from birth to two years old, through the use of their senses, are building schemas or mental models. It is quite common to see a five month old sitting up and grabbing at some toys dangling in front of him. In the beginning, children would form a schema that any animal that walks on all four legs is a dog. As they grow older, they will modify this schema and create additional schemas for other types of aminals, such as cats and other large animals. Schemas are how children on up to adulthood understand and make sense of their world. We all are constantly modifying our existing schemas and creating new schemas as we accomodate new knowledge.

Children with learning disabilities take a bit longer to progress through the stages that Piaget has laid out. Children who have been severely maltreated will also progress much slower through the stages. There have been cases where a child has been locked up in a closet in a room for many years. The child, having no contact with the outside world, has become severely retarded both physically and mentally. A child maltreated to this extreme would be said to have a mental age of a 5 year old, while their chronological age is say 12. The child has missed many critical periods of development. If a child were an infant locked in a closet until he or she was say 5 years old, the child would no doubt be blind as the optic nerves would have missed a critical period to develop.

Parents have the ultimate ability to help their children develop cognitively. If parents were to read to their children while still infants, or having their children observe adults reading a newspaper or a book, their children will be more likely to pick up on those things at an earlier age. Children are developing sooner than Piaget’s stages indicate. Two influences are the media, followed by both parents working which leave the children to be on their own and assume more grown up responsibilities. As a result, boys and girls alike are reaching puberty at much earlier ages. Girls are wearing make up and filling out at earlier ages. In one way, this is scary. The times are changing.

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