You cannot send a three-year-old child to the supermarket alone to do an errand for you. Nor can you expect a seven-year-old child to look after his newborn baby sister. Or ask your fourteen-year-old, sweet in the playpen, to play with his cars. When can children actually perform certain actions? And at what age, for example, can they think and reason logically?
Psychological development
The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896-1980) came to the conclusion that mental growth is caused by qualitative changes. Most psychologists of that time saw the child as a miniature version of an adult and thought that concepts such as time, space, number and the cause-effect relationship were present immediately at birth. According to Piaget, intelligence is an example of adaptive behavior. He attempted to chart the gradual progress of human intelligence as he grew up. Piaget mapped out four stages of development, from zero to fifteen years.
The sensorimotor phase from zero to two years
Sensorimotor means the link between sensory and motor skills. Sensory is the acquisition of stimuli through the ears, eyes, sense of touch and balance. Motor skills are the ability to move. The development from reflexive behavior to goal-oriented behavior takes place in the first phase. An infant only makes reflex movements, for example he accidentally bumps into a toy, causing it to make a sound. Seeing and moving the baby has nothing to do with intelligent actions. When the child begins to understand that the action he is performing, for example bumping the toy, is the cause of the sound it produces, it becomes an intelligent action. At about the age of six months, the child starts to understand that his hand movements are related to something he does himself. He has learned that he can not only look at certain objects, but he can also touch the object and even make it make sounds. According to Piaget, these sensorimotor processes form the beginning of intelligent thinking or reasoning.
The symbolic thinking of two to seven years
As long as the child sees an object, the object also exists, but as soon as the object is no longer visible, it no longer exists. The child has no idea about the durability of objects. It is therefore terrifying for a child in that phase to see his mother disappear and this is often accompanied by heavy crying fits. It is therefore very important to play peek-a-boo with the child during this phase, so that it learns that if the mother is not visible for a while, she does not really disappear. The next step is object constancy, which means that a child can form an image of objects without seeing them. This is an important condition for the next step, thoughtful action. In the previous stage, the child could only come into contact with the world through sensory or motor actions. Now it is possible to do that just by thinking about it, the child has the whole world in his head, so to speak. The child’s imagination now allows him to handle objects in a symbolic way. For example, he can see his stuffed dog as a real dog and a chair becomes a racing car. The child also begins to understand language at this stage. The child understands that the image of a car can also be a word in your head. The child starts to think intuitively and forms concepts. A concept is an abstract image of certain objects or events.
Immutability
When the child is seven years old, he begins to understand that things do not change when they take a different form. For example, lemonade in a tall glass, when the lemonade is poured into a glass with a different shape, the amount of lemonade will not change. Piaget tested this by filling two identical glasses with lemonade in front of the children, after which he poured the contents of one glass into a tall, oblong glass. He then asked the children if there was the same amount of lemonade in both glasses. Children under seven thought that there was more in the tall glass because the lemonade level was higher. Seven-year-old children were not entirely sure, but eight-year-old children were quite certain that the amount had remained the same.
Reversibility
The child also begins to understand in this phase that every change can be undone. For example, a piece of clay made into a ball is the same amount of clay if you make it into a long string. So you can simply turn it into a ball again.
Concrete operations from seven to twelve years
In this phase, children can already think and reason a bit logically by using concepts. For example, an eight-year-old can sort sticks by length. He understands the processes that determine the relationship of objects in space, for example that things are next to each other or behind each other. The child also begins to understand the combination of time and distance and the estimation of area and length. In this phase, children cannot yet deal with problems that are not visible. With a problem expressed in words such as: Ruben is older than Rob and Rob is younger than Ruben, who is the oldest? an eight-year-old can’t start anything.
Formal operations from twelve to fifteen years
When a child notices that an effort does not lead to a desired result, he can retrace his steps. After the child has grasped the concept of reversibility after forming images and concepts, he or she can take the next step, handling abstract ideas. Mentally, the child has now reached the point where, thanks to symbolic thinking and the use of the concepts of object constancy and reversibility, he can form his own ideas about various possibilities. The child can ask himself which options are the best and, at his own discretion, carry out this choice in his mind or try it out in concrete terms. A fifteen-year-old is able to combine logical actions and use formal logic to solve problems.
Finally
The various phases arise through the continuous creative activity and through the interaction that the child has with its environment. His knowledge and understanding of the world around him increases at every stage. Every new encounter and all new knowledge that the child gains requires reorganization of the knowledge and skills already acquired. In this way, paths to more complicated forms of intelligence, behavior and reasoning are opened.
read more
- Growing up: The adolescence period
- Growing up: Physical development in the adolescent
- Growing up: Wow, I’m growing up
- Growing up: The baby phase
- Growing up: Middle age