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

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To Piaget, cognitive development was a progressive reorganization of mental processes as a result of biological maturation and environmental experience.

Schemas are mental structures that contain all of the information relating to one aspect of the world around us. According to Piaget’s theory, children should not be taught certain concepts until they have reached the appropriate stage of cognitive development. For example, Keating (1979) reported that 40-60% of college students fail at formal operation tasks, and Dasen (1994) states that only one-third of adults ever reach the formal operational stage. Social media platforms offer a dynamic environment conducive to Piaget’s principles. These platforms allow for interactions that nurture knowledge evolution through cognitive processes like assimilation and accommodation. Ages 12 to 18 is called adolescence. Kids and teens in this age group do more complex thinking. This type of thinking is also known as formal logical operations. This includes the ability to:Piaget failed to distinguish between competence (what a child is capable of doing) and performance (what a child can show when given a particular task). When tasks were altered, performance (and therefore competence) was affected. Therefore, Piaget might have underestimated children’s cognitive abilities.

The child’s development consists of building experiences about the world through adaptation and working towards the (concrete) stage when it can use logical thought. Vygotsky, a contemporary of Piaget, argued that social interaction is crucial for cognitive development. According to Vygotsky the child’s learning always occurs in a social context in cooperation with someone more skillful (MKO). This social interaction provides language opportunities and Vygotsky considered language the foundation of thought. A child’s cognitive development is not just about acquiring knowledge, the child has to develop or construct a mental model of the world, which is referred to as a schema.

FAQs

A child’s thinking is dominated by how the world looks, not how the world is. It is not yet capable of logical (problem-solving) type of thought. 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. Accommodation: when the new experience is very different from what we have encountered before we need to change our schemas in a very radical way or create a whole new schema. During this stage, children also become less egocentric and begin to think about how other people might think and feel. The main achievement during this stage is object permanence– knowing that an object still exists, even if it is hidden. It requires the ability to form a mental representation (i.e., a schema) of the object.