Piaget Developmental Stages

From the very moment that we are conceived, our brain continues to grow each and everyday until it reaches its desired adult size. This sustained period of growth plays a pivotal role in jump-starting cognitive development, which is the development of thinking, problem solving, and memory. There was a time that people believed young children and adults had alike thought processes. However, Swiss-born clinical psychologist, Jean Piaget reversed this notion by theorizing that there are four separate stages to this process that occur from the time before your first birthday up until you begin approaching adulthood. The four stages are the sensorimotor, preoperational, concrete operations, and formal operations. Experiencing these stages is crucial
A 3-year-old child is currently in Piaget’s second stage, also known as the preoperational stage that is concerned with children between the ages of two and seven. These children have now acquired the ability to use language to ask questions as means of exploring the world, but are also faced with several limitations that revolve around their inability to think logically. Preoperational children develop egocentrism, which is the disregard of beliefs and attitudes that differ from one’s own. An example of this would be when inside a vehicle in motion, a young child is convinced that the sun or moon is following them, but when someone tries to tell them otherwise they let them know that they are incorrect. Another limitation is centration, which is concentrating on only on one aspect of a single object rather than considering all of its features. For example, a young boy might be resentful that his older sibling got two cookies when he only got one, but perhaps would become happy once his cookie is broken into
This stage is associated with children ages seven to twelve. Children in this stage are introduced to new abilities such as being capable of conservation and reversible thinking. Also, centration becomes nonexistent as children have learned to take all of an object’s features into consideration. An education and information learned in school has made all of these advances possible. The child’s ability to problem solve and think logically has never been more apparent. However, these prepubescent children are still denied the ability to think abstractly, but will eventually be obtained in the following stage. For example, “love” is an abstract image that these concrete operational children can not quite yet make sense of or understand because it is not an object that they can physically touch or