Piaget's Cognitive Development Study

Although a child can progress at a faster or slower rate, the average age of a child being in the sensorimotor stage is from newborn to around the age of two. During this stage, according to Sean McLeod who has studied in psychology, “The child does not perceive himself as a discrete entity within his environments.” When a baby at the park is pulling on his mother’s hair, he doesn’t have any idea how this could affect the mother. During this stage, he is only able to understand that he is capable of doing it and that is brings him pleasure, he can not put himself in the view of the mother or what she experiences from this action. At this point in development infants’ awareness of the world comes through their sensory and motor skills which …show more content…
This stage is essential in understanding how a child comes to fully express his human nature because it is what leads to a child really using his intellect or passing the age of reason. Having the capability to think rationally is what leads a person to choose to have a relationship with God. All the love and engagement that was formed in the relationship during the first stage allows for the proper progression that is achieved in the next. The goal during this period of development is to move away from this egocentric view of the world, get closer to the idea of logical thinking and have more of an understanding of the viewpoint of others. The main development in this period is symbolic representation. The most important symbolic representation being developed in this stage is language. However, Piaget believed that language reflects what the child already knows and that cognitive development is what promotes language development rather than language contributing to new …show more content…
Language is the way of expressing oneself, and explaining opinions and the ideas one understands. Children develop this task as they begin to make one thing stand for something else, they give an object a name. This part of development is where the child’s family comes in to help. “If a parent hardly bothered to speak or otherwise attempt to communicate with his/her baby, then that child would be unlikely to learn language as well and as quickly as other children of the same age.” Therefore, the parents or family’s job is to communicate with their child, and help him to understand the meanings behind the words they are saying.
In the preoperational stage of development, the child mainly progresses in playing with others, and is working towards being able to decenter. Decentering means that the child can focus on more than one aspect of a situation at one time; this skill is difficult at the beginning of the preoperational stage. This is often observed when a child starts misbehaving or crying when there is a lot of chaos or several things are going on all at one time. Children have trouble focusing on everything that is going on and they end up getting upset because they have not reached the goal of