The View of the Developmental Psychologist

The first substantial challenge to this idea came from the Swiss psychologist, Piaget, who was a very astute observer of infants and children. He was particularly interested in what is called cognitive development, that is the way that a child’s view and interaction with the world developed, starting with the newborn baby. This was no mean undertaking and it was largely uncharted territory. Piaget’s own children were the focus of much of his attention and this enabled him to spend much time seeing how their minds developed. He was very impressed by the way in which children and infants were active in their own development. This set a new trend in the understanding of child development with a consequential effect on education which did much to make schools pleasanter places to be.

Piaget was a trail blazer and since he was breaking new ground in what turned out to be a very large subject, it is not surprising that some aspects of his work have come in for criticism later. In Piaget’s day it was considered that cognitive, emotional and social development could be considered separately. It is now realised that this is not the case and that all these aspects are interrelated. If a child is unhappy it will detrimentally affect their learning, while social problems, such as bullying, are obvious things which can make a child unhappy. The modern approach is therefore to consider development as an interrelated process. Other criticisms have followed but before we consider these it is instructive to pursue our evolutionary and historical approach to understand how progress was first made.

Piaget began his ideas from the stage of the newborn baby. We have seen the views of the reductionists and their emphasis on structure and physiology. Work on these lines still continues and often supplements the work of the behavioural psychologist. However, most of the early work was done by studying behaviour during development. From the point of fertilisation the baby develops in the womb from egg to zygote to embryo and thence to the foetus before the stage of birth. The first recognised signs of consciousness occur in the foetus when movement is detected and about this stage the ear is sufficiently developed to recognise the mother’s voice. It is affected by the mother’s voice and prolonged periods of stress in the mother seem to affect the foetus at this stage. Substance abuse can also affect the conscious state of the foetus and research shows that some substances can lead to attention deficit disorder later in life. Much has been written about birth trauma, but we all have to go through it unless born by caesarian section. Gynaecologists now believe that evolution has prepared us for this event.

Piaget’s work begins at the stage of the neonate, or new born, baby. It seems that the neonate is equipped with a set of reflexes such as those for breathing, sucking and grasping, and an appetite or tendency to do certain things. As a result, from a very early stage, the baby begins to interact with the mother and the environment. The neonate’s vision is rather hazy at this stage but improves over the first month of life. With improving vision comes recognition of faces, of which the mother’s comes to play a predominant role, as does her voice. At first the neonate’s concerns are largely with surviving, such as feeding, sleeping and excreting. With time the initial reflexes enable the baby to gain greater control over movement until most of the reflexes are replaced by conscious control. Piaget considered this to be the first stage of what he called the sensory motor development which is the development of the child to approximately 24 months. This period must rate as the stage at which the most dramatic transformation takes place. In ways appropriate to the stage of development the infant is exploring what it can do. At first it explores its own body, and sexual awareness of a sort develops at a  remarkably early stage, as Freud pointed out. It is a stage of repetition, at first with its own body, and then with objects in the environment.

As the child learns to move around we see the early stages of intentionality, usually at about 8 to 12 months of age when the child is beginning to solve simple problems. By 18 months the infant is combining new skills to find ways to solve more difficult problems. Language is developing at this stage, from the first word to combinations of words. This enables a greater level of interaction with parents, siblings and some adults such as grandparents who often play with them. Children learn through play and one game which is played with infants is hiding an object of some interest to them. This shows various stages of understanding over a period of time. A very young child will ignore an object when it is hidden, but with time will find the object, first when it is partially hidden and later when hidden completely. The infant begins to use words to think about things such as where the hidden object is, not just speaking words but beginning to internalise them and thinking takes on a verbal form. By 2 years speech is usually well under way and most parents are impressed by what is called the ‘naming explosion’ when the infant learns many new names. Some of the problems solved at this stage are quite practical such as using a stick to reach for an object which would otherwise be out of reach.

Imitation of parents and of siblings plays a large part in the infant’s learning. The repertoire of behaviour is increasing rapidly all the time, some based on imitation but some are new combinations. The difficulty of tasks is observed to increase with the increase of experience. Advances in mobility help to extend what infants can reach, observe and handle. Mobility itself develops gradually from crawling to the first stumbling steps. The nervous system gradually learns to integrate the necessary skills but this takes time and develops in stages. Piaget demonstrated once and for all that in reaching the 2 year old stage we must consider it as a developmental process. 2 year olds do not come ready made. Indeed, Piaget pointed out that the process does not stop here and there are at least 2 more stages to go through.

Anybody familiar with young children knows that children are quite inventive and inquisitive. They are active in their own learning and enjoy games such as peekaboo, when an adult hides their face with their hands for a while and then removes their hands. Making learning fun is a great aid to progress.

Piaget’s sensory motor period has come in for some criticism. Some developmental psychologists believe that the new born baby enters the world with a greater intuitive understanding of what materials are like, such as hard and soft objects, liquid and solids and animate and inanimate objects. They don’t believe that this knowledge has to be gained through exploration in the early sensory motor stage. Other developmental psychologists think that the reality is somewhere between the view of Piaget and Neo-nativism psychologists. The Neo-nativists also think that children have a better grasp of the permanence of objects than Piaget believed and that his tests were too complex for the age of the child. They also think that a propensity for some of these skills, such as symbolic thinking, is built in. For example, they think that from an early age children recognise the number of objects present and are aware if one goes missing, although initially only with small numbers. 

As we have already noted emotional, cognitive and social development are all integrated. However, cognitive development has come in for special consideration in part because of Piaget’s initial work but also because these skills are fundamental to social development. Emotional developments progress in parallel. As one psychologist notes, every thought process has an emotional valency such as whether we like that or not. Needless to say, emotional valency varies a lot in intensity and we sometimes remember both pleasant and unpleasant things, even from youth.

These early stages form the foundation of our development, but then Piaget recognised a second phase, approximately from 2 to 7 years of age, the Pre-operational stage. Of course one stage merges into another and there is considerable variation between individuals. However, Piaget’s Pre-operational phase is a good place to start looking at further development.

During this period children are widening their social contacts, particularly with other children. It is also a period when most children in developed countries begin school. At first children tend to see everything from their own point of view. Piaget described this as egocentric thinking, although other psychologists believe that children of this age may have some grasp of how others think. Certainly it is a stage when children meet other children and encounter opposition occasionally. Through these encounters they gradually learn about other’s thinking, a process which continues even to adulthood.

Piaget thought that at this stage children tend to attribute animistic explanations to inanimate objects. They may say, when bumping into a chair, “The chair hit me”, or “The wind blows to make me cold”, but not all psychologists think that animistic thinking is as prevalent at this age. This aspect of development runs into Piaget’s claim that these children tend not to think logically. Others disagree, pointing out that a fair test must take into account the age and stage of development of the child. Certainly children become more logical as they get older. Hand in hand with this development goes the emergence of symbolic thinking. Their minds are able to retain memories from the past and use them. These may be things they have seen, heard or touched. It all adds to their creativity.

Piaget is well known for his studies of whether children can reason about conservation, as when water is poured from a tall container into a squat container. If these are made of glass the child can see the level of liquid and, by Piaget’s next developmental stage, that is the Concrete-operational stage, they have no trouble in understanding that the water in both containers is the same amount.