The development of your mind as a child is the foundation of the rest of your life. It’s the basic skills required to live an ordinary life. With each new year as you get older things will be developing in your mind and helping you understand more about the world around you. As early as 7 months in the womb your brain starts to be developing and is producing neurons. With this then comes the constant growth outside of the womb which come in 4 cognitive development stages found by Jean Piaget. These stages are Sensorimotor (birth-2 years old), Preoperational (2-6/7 years old), Concrete operational (7-11 years old), and Formal operational (12 years through adulthood). These stages include critical areas of functioning and learning where they help set up the rest of your life. A brief overview of all the stages- sensorimotor is where you take the world through senses, preoperational is where you start to learn a language but don’t understand logic and can’t take another’s viewpoint, concrete operational you can be able to think logically and understand mathematical transformations, and formal operational you can start thinking logically about abstract concepts. These stages are just a theory by Piaget and now contemporary beliefs are showing more of a continuous development rather the formal stages of it all.
Even though these stages are more continuous and flow better as someone grows older you can still see these developments happening. For example, my cousin was born about 10 years ago and watching her grow up over the years it is clear to see all of the stages happening. It was fascinating to see her understanding more things and to figure out life. Even though I was only 8 years old when she was born I can remember what she was like early on, even when I was still going through the stages of development myself. When she was about a year old you could see how she was navigating the world through putting everything in her mouth and at the time it was confusing to me but now I know she didn’t know any better and her mind wasn’t as developed as mine yet. Then when she was 3 you could see that she could talk a little but not quite understand anybody else or how their perspective on life was which was clear to me at the time because my brain was developed in the way to know that hers’ wasn’t fully developed yet. It was so interesting to see how these stages connected to me watching it actually happening in my cousin. Then in the following years I got to see her being able to think for herself and understand more and more, so then I actually enjoyed spending time with her because she could know what we were talking about. Even though I didn’t know specifically these stages were happening at the time it all now makes sense of why she was doing what she was doing and when in her life she was.
I enjoyed reading about your experience watching your cousin grow up. I think it’s really cool that there was quite a bit of an age difference (8 years), so you could perceive more of a difference. For me, my brother is only 2 years younger, so I never felt like he was way different than me in terms of cognitive development staging. I like how you connected stages with specific observations you had. However, I wonder if what you saw was somewhat countering Piaget’s theory of abrupt stages, as psychologists nowadays believe that changes are more gradual in children (which might make more sense). In addition, I wonder whether your cousin’s stages of social development and moral development are also falling in line with what we learned in class, as there are so many factors to consider outside of cognition. It would be really interesting to observe your cousin go through adolescence as it is a time of such drastic change and identity-finding, as her frontal cortex will undergo slower development than her limbic system, and connections between parts of her brain become more efficient with the selective pruning of neurons.
I really related to this story. Although I am the youngest in my family, I have 2 younger cousins. I have seen both of them go through all of these phases even though I didn’t know what they were called. This is great and very descriptive!