Jack's Development In The Movie Room

The movie Room is about a young boy, Jack, who is raised in a shed for the first five years of his life. His mother, Ma, does her best to provide for him the best she can while being confined to the shed. Throughout the movie, we see how Jack develops in his early years of childhood and how being restricted in the shed has affected his social skills as well as his developmental progress.
Jack has an extremely different environment than that of a normal boy his age. In Jack’s environment, he never goes outside, nor does he have any toys or friends to play with. He lives with his mother and only comes into contact with her. During the movie, we see how his mother tries to make up for the small space they have. She has him run back and forth to
They would most likely be in school learning basic academic topics as well as developing social skills. They would play outside with friends, or with toys, or with their family. They would not be confined to their house and instead would be encouraged to go outside and play. These children would have an understanding that the world is much bigger than they are and that there is much more to be discovered than they know. Most children would be in some type of sports team or exercise activity.
Jean Piaget was the godfather of development, developing a constructivist approach to how children develop. While believing to have a continuous theory, Piaget had a discontinuous model for his theory. He believed children learned in stages and in order to get to the next stage, they had to “pass” the previous stage. Piaget believed children learned about the world by exploring their surroundings. Piaget had four stages in his theory: sensorimotor (0-2 years), preoperational (2-7 years), concrete operational (7-12 years), and formal operational (12+
Jack was able to develop and learn almost normally while in the room from the teaching of his mother. While he did not have the complete development that a five year old would have, he was still able to communicate and function in the real world as a child slightly behind the normal developmental rate. It is hard to assess his learning abilities because we never saw him in a school environment, but we did see that he was clearly able to form sentences, have comprehensive conversations, and read books. For example, we see Jack reading “Alice in Wonderland” and having serious conversations with his mother, like when she tells him there is an outside world that he does not know about and that things are not always what they seem.
One scene that stood out to me was the scene where Ma gets mad at Jack for constantly watching shows and playing on the phone because she did not think he would develop the right social skills. She forced him to play with the toys that had been donated for him saying that most kids would be lucky to have all of those. Towards the end of the movie, we see Jack playing with his neighbor. This proves to us, that even though Jack grew up with little to no outside social skills, he was still able to make friends and will most likely develop more social skills, as he grows