Piaget on Childhood Development

In the early 1900s, Swiss biologist Jean Piaget had a baby girl. He became obsessed with his daughter’s behavior, carefully noting the things she did. He created broad theories about childhood development based on his children, eventually becoming more of a psychologist than a biologist. Though many of his theories are taught today, he is widely criticized for being too biological and rigid with his definitions.

One of Piaget’s main ideas focused on reflexes being the basis of all human behavior. He believed that children were able to transform into complex adults by using their reflexes and eventually learning the consequences of their actions. He also believed that the goal of learning was to have effective interactions with the environment, so it all came down to survival. One of the more controversial things he argued with learning is that not only do children learn more things as they grow up, but the way they think about these things fundamentally changes overtime. Since Piaget’s time, there have been several experiments supporting this theory. For example, young children are unable to order objects based on a characteristic (ie smallest to biggest dog). This is thought to be because they can only conceptualize information in one dimension, and comparing a known thing to another thing is too complex. This is why children are unable to understand or “take” the perspective of other people

In continuation of this theory, Piaget also argued that there are 4 stages of development:

Children in the sensorimotor stage think about the world through sensations and motor responses. Because of this, they will redo things over and over again, as they only understand the “here and now” and don’t understand cause and effect. They also struggle to understand anything that isn’t directly in front of them. This is why young kids like to play peek-a-boo — they literally think that you’ve disappeared when you cover their eyes. In the preoperational stage, the child now understands that objects out of sight still exist, but struggles to understand operations and logic. One interesting study on this took children 2-6 and showed them images of red boats, blue boats, red rabbits, and blue rabbits. They would start by asking the children to categorize the pictures by animal. The kids would get this. Then, the psychologists would ask them to categorize them by color. Despite being able to repeat the instructions, the child would continue to organize the pictures by animal. The psychologists did this experience in reverse and found the same results. It seems as if children can follow directions, but they can still only consider one point of view.

As development continues, children get better at understanding their surroundings and eventually see the world in the same way as adults. Though some of Piaget’s theories are debated, he gave a good framework for studying development.