What's My Child Thinking?: Practical Child Psychology for Modern Parents

Product Information

While Piaget’s stages offer a foundational framework, they are not universally experienced in the same way by all children. During this stage, young children can think about things symbolically. This is the ability to make one thing, such as a word or an object, stand for something other than itself. When a child’s existing schemas are capable of explaining what it can perceive around it, it is said to be in a state of equilibrium, i.e., a state of cognitive (i.e., mental) balance.

Piaget’s contribution to psychology was mainly through his observations of children’s cognitive development (Papalia & Feldman, 2011). Early in his career, Piaget scored the IQ tests that Alfred Binet administered to children. Piaget did not want to measure how well children could count, spell or solve problems as a way of grading their I.Q. What he was more interested in was the way in which fundamental concepts like the very idea of number, time, quantity, causality, justice, and so on emerged. Cultural Context in Conservation Tasks: In a society where resources are scarce, children might demonstrate conservation skills earlier due to the cultural emphasis on preserving and reusing materials. In this stage, children also learn more about categorization. They can classify items based on similarities or differences. They also start to understand numbers and quantity (e.g., concepts such as ‘more’ or ‘bigger’). Wadsworth, B. J. (2004). Piaget’s theory of cognitive and affective development: Foundations of constructivism. New York: Longman. Further Reading

1. The Sensorimotor Stage

Recognizing the importance of play in cognitive development, many parents provide toys and games suited for their child’s developmental stage. However, Smith et al. (1998), point out that some children develop earlier than Piaget predicted and that by using group work children can learn to appreciate the views of others in preparation for the concrete operational stage. By the beginning of the concrete operational stage, the child can use operations (a set of logical rules) so she can conserve quantities, she realizes that people see the world in a different way than he does (decentring) and he has improved in inclusion tasks. Children still have difficulties with abstract thinking. Although no stage can be missed out, there are individual differences in the rate at which children progress through stages, and some individuals may never attain the later stages. For example, egocentrism dominates a child’s thinking in the sensorimotor and preoperational stages. Piaget would therefore predict that using group activities would not be appropriate since children are not capable of understanding the views of others.

Piaget defined assimilation as the cognitive process of fitting new information into existing cognitive schemas, perceptions, and understanding. Overall beliefs and understanding of the world do not change as a result of the new information.Children struggle with conservation because they can only focus on one dimension at a time; this is known as centering. For example, with the volume of liquid, they can only consider the shape of the glass, but not the shape of the glass and the volume of water. Language: Multilingual children might navigate the stages differently, especially if their home language differs from their school language. The way concepts are framed in different languages can influence cognitive processing. Cultural idioms and metaphors can shape a child’s understanding of concepts and their ability to use symbolic representation, especially in the pre-operational stage. Thinking is “irreversible” in that the child cannot appreciate that a reverse transformation would return the material to its original state. Reversibility is a crucial aspect of the logical (operational) thought of later stages. The importance of this viewpoint is that the child is seen as an active participant in its own development rather than a passive recipient of either biological influences (maturation) or environmental stimulation.