Growing Up: Psychological Development from Zero to Fifteen

You can't send a three-year-old child to the supermarket to do groceries for you. You also can't expect a seven-year-old to babysit his newborn baby sister. Or ask your fourteen-year-old, sweetly in his playpen, to go play with his cars. When can children perform certain tasks? And at what age can they, for example, reason and think logically?

Psychological development

The Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget (1896-1980) drew the conclusion that mental growth is caused by qualitative changes. Most psychologists in those days saw the child as a miniature version of an adult and thought that concepts such as time, space, number and the cause and effect relationship were already present at birth. According to Piaget, intelligence is an example of adjustment behaviour. He attempted to map the gradual progess of human intelligence during growing up and mapped four development phases, from zero to fifteen years of age.

The sensorimotor phase from zero to two years old

Sensorimotor means the connection between sensory and motor skills. Sensory is reacting to stimuli by means of the ears, the eyes, touch and balance. Motor skills means the ability to move. The development from reflexive behaviour to purposive behaviour takes place in the first phase. An infant merely performs reflexive movements. For example, s/he accidentally hits a toy and causes it to make noise. The baby's seeing and moving have nothing to do with intelligent acts yet. When the child starts to understand that the act s/he performs, for example the hitting against the toy, is the cause of the noise that is then created, that is when it becomes an intelligent act. At the age of six months the child begins to understand that his or her hand movements are connected to something that s/he is doing. The baby has learned that s/he can't just watch certain objects, but also touch them and even make them make noise. According to Piaget these sensorimotor processes form the beginning of intelligent thinking or reasoning.

The symbolic thinking from two to seven years old

As long as the child sees the object, it exists. But as soon as the object can't be seen anymore, it also stops existing. A child has no idea about the durability of objects. This is why it is terrifying for a child in this phase to see their mother disappear and this is often accompanied by strong crying fits. Therefore, it is very important to play peek-a-boo with the child during this phase, to teach it that if the mother can't be seen for a moment, she doesn't actually disappear. The next step is object constancy, which means that a child can form a mental image of objects without seeing them. This is an important condition for the next step: acting thoughtfully. In the previous phase, the child could only get into contact with the world through sensory or motor actions. Now it is possibily to do this by merely thinking about it. In a manner of speaking, the child has the entire world inside his or her head. His or her imagination makes it possible to manipulate objects symbolically. For example, s/he can see their cuddly toy as a real dog and a chair can become a racing car. During this phase the child also starts to understand language and understand that the image of a car can also be a word inside your head. The child starts to think intuitively and forms concepts. A concept is an abstract idea of certain objects or events.

Unchangeability

When the child is seven years old, it starts to understand that things don't change when they take on a new form. For example lemonade in a tall glass: when the lemonade is formed into a glass of a different shape, the amount of it won't change. Piaget tested this by filling two of the same glasses with lemonade in front of the children, after which he poured the content of one glass into a tall long glass. Then he asked the children if there was the same amount of lemonade in both glasses. Children younger than seven thought the tall glass contained more, because the level of lemonade was higher. Seven-year-olds weren't entirely sure, but eight-year-olds were very sure that the amount had remained the same.

Reversibility

In this phase, the child also begins to understand that every change can be reversed. For example: a piece of clay that had been turned into a ball contains the same amount of clay when it is turned into a long string. And so you can turn it back into a ball.

Concrete operations from seven to twelve years old

In this phase children can already think a little logically and reason by using concepts. An eight-year-old can, for example, sort sticks by length. S/he understands the processes which 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 assessment of surface and length. In this phase children can't yet handle problems which aren't visible. For example, an eight-year-old can't do anything with a verbal problem such as: "Ruben is older than Rob and Rob is younger than Ruben; who is the oldest one?"

Formal operations from twelve to fifteen years old

When a child realises that an effort doesn't lead to the desired result, it can return to its steps. After the child has understood the notion of reversibility after forming images and concepts, it can now take the next step: managing abstract ideas. Mentally, the child has now reached the point where, thanks to symbolic thinking and using concepts, object constancy and reversibility, it can form its own ideas about various possibilities. The child can figure out which options are the best and perform this choice in their mind or try it out concretely. A fifteen-year-old is capable of combining logical actions and using formal logic to solve problems.

Finally

Because of the continuous creative activity and the interaction the child has with his or her environment, various phases come into being. His or her knowledge and understanding of the surrounding world increase in every phase. A new encounter and all new knowledge the child acquires through it means there needs to be a reorganisation of all gained knowledge and skills. Roads to more complex forms of intelligence, behaviour and reasoning are opened this way.

Sources: www.todio.nl