Child development from infancy to adolescence using Piaget's theory

Piaget’s Stages of Development
Few theorists have had as strong an impact on developmental psychology as Jean Piaget. While the theories of Lev Vygotsky have offered compelling counterpoints to Piaget’s theories, the stages of psychosocial development Piaget proposed remain salient. In fact, it is easy to combine emerging research on childhood development from infancy to adolescence in terms of Piaget’s stages. As Lightfoot, Cole & Cole (2009) point out, evolutionary theories, information processing theories, and systems theories can all be integrated within the staged concept of development that Piaget proposed. Piaget shows how children develop physically, socially, and cognitively. Likewise, theories of childhood development can demonstrate how children develop self-awareness, empathy, and complex use of language. The four main stages of development include the sensorimotor, the preoperational, the concrete operational, and the formal operational. While far from being discreet stages with strong demarcations between them, empirical research in cognitive, behavioral, and biological sciences have shown that indeed children do exhibit specific features of psychosocial, cognitive, and physical development during the age brackets Piaget had observed.
Infancy: The Sensorimotor Stage
The first few years of life prove critically transformative for childhood development physically, cognitively, and even socially and emotionally. In fact, research shows that infants do already have self-awareness and “are capable of demonstrating already a sense of their own body as a differentiated entity: an entity among other entities in the environment,” (Rochat, 2003, p. 717). Self-awareness during infancy is mainly body related, linked to the ability of infants to differentiate between self-oriented touch and being touched by others (Rochat, 2003). Therefore, research on infant cognition and perception substantiates Piaget’s claim that sensorimotor mastery is the key goal of this stage of childhood development. Piaget claimed that during the sensorimotor stage, infants gain knowledge of the world and themselves by “coordinating sensory perceptions and simple motor responses,” (Lightfoot, Cole & Cole, 2009, p. 144). Research in biology and human development shows that infants are developing their sensorimotor skills by engaging with objects, particularly by reaching and grabbing (Rochat, 2003). Also evident at the sensorimotor stage is the infant’s ability to learn via both classical and operant conditioning, such as with the introduction of stimuli to induce specific behavioral responses (Lightfoot, Cole & Cole, 2009). Infants demonstrate the ability to form social attachments and exhibit individualized emotional responses, too, with differences depending on environmental factors like parental behavior and culture (Lightfoot, Cole & Cole, 2009. While their ability to understand and use language has yet to emerge, at this early developmental stage infants do communicate using nonverbal communication including crying and the use of facial expressions.
However, the most striking features of infant development is on the physical level, with major shifts in the child’s biology. The rapid growth of the brain and central nervous system, for example, is also paralleled by corresponding changes in the ways the child processes and responds to sensory input (Lightfoot, Cole & Cole, 2009). Infants also exhibit rapid changes in the ways the bones and muscles are developing, dependent of course on nutrition and also genetics (Britto, Lye, Proulx, et al. 2017).
Toddler and Early Childhood: The Preoperational Stage
The next stage in Piaget’s model of childhood development is known as the preoperational stage. During this stage, the child exhibits increasing sophistication in terms of emotional, psychological, and cognitive skills. Through observation and social learning, the toddler comes to understand which emotional expressions are socially acceptable or approved and which are not, leading to the ability to “elaborate,” and even control emotional responses in the first real demonstration of self-mastery (Labouvie-Vief, 2015, p. 67). Self-mastery behaviors are also evident in the way the child is starting to control bodily functions like toilet as well as aggressive responses (Lightfoot, Cole & Cole, 2009). The child is developing an “early understanding of the relationship between mental states and behavior,” which also leads to the burgeoning awareness of morality and social norms (Lightfoot, Cole & Cole, 2009, p. 287). While the early stages of empathy development may begin in infancy when the child actually responds in kind when hearing another baby cry, it is during early childhood that empathy, altruism, and prosocial behaviors really take root (Demetrious, 2018; Lightfoot, Cole & Cole, 2009).
These important psychological and cognitive shifts in early childhood occur in accordance with language skills development: which is one of the cornerstones of the preoperational stage. In addition to being more aware of the emotions and how they are affecting other people in their social sphere, the child is developing more sophisticated self-awareness and self consciousness (Labouvie-Vief, 2015). Interestingly, the child at this stage is starting to recognize the difference between inanimate and animate objects (Lightfoot, Cole & Cole, 2009). The preoperational stage is physically defined by the evolution of fine motor skills. Socialization becomes critical during the preoperational stage, and while the beginnings of an individuated personality do appear in the sensorimotor/infant stage, that personality starts to become more cohesive during early childhood. In fact, the child starts to construct identity based on individual and external cues (Lightfoot, Cole & Cole, 2009). That identity may be influenced by constructs like gender and ethnicity.
Middle Childhood: The Concrete Operational Stage
Middle childhood spans the period between around seven years of age to pre-adolescence, around ten or eleven years old. This stage is characterized by major cognitive leaps: with the child being able to perform more complex computational tasks involving logic and induction, abstract representations, object conservation, and reversibility (McLeod, 2010). Furthermore, middle childhood is defined by the child’s increasing entrenchment in the social environment at school, with peer relations having a strong bearing on cognitive, emotional, and linguistic development (Lantolf, Thorne & Poehner, 2014). The child’s ability to self-regulate has less to do with strict ascription to rules or a self-centered method of reasoning and more to do with concern for others, empathy, and altruism (Lightfoot, Cole & Cole, 2009). The child also develops what is known as “metacognition,” and the ability to decentralize problem solving to take into account multiple variables (Lightfoot, Cole & Cole, 2009, p. 401). Factors like memory processing and identity construction also factor into the major cognitive changes taking place at this critical stage in childhood development. Physical skills development is taking place at this stage, albeit not as rapidly as in infancy or even early childhood, and without the life-altering biological changes that occur in the following stage: adolescence. However, the concrete operational stage is accompanied by the child’s ability to master physical tasks with improved gross and fine motor skills. Skeletal growth is of course taking place, with the gradual loss of the deciduous teeth and the lengthening of bones.
Adolescence: The Formal Operational Stage
Adolescence and what Piaget called the formal operational stage marks a period of growth and development that is the most dramatic since infancy. Puberty is the defining feature of this stage of development. At the onset of puberty, the brain and body are changing rapidly due to the shift in hormones and overall biological development. Girls may start puberty earlier than boys, initially exhibiting faster bone growth and the onset of sexual maturation (Lightfoot, Cole & Cole, 2009). The biological and physiological changes taking place during adolescence occur in accordance with major shifts in cognition and emotion, and also in social relationships and identity. The same hormones implicated in sexual differentiation and the emergence of sexual behaviors create an overall sense that adolescence is characterized by “storm and stress,” (Plote, 2017, p. 341). While this may be true, adolescence is far too complex to reduce to the “storm and stress” model, with the emergence of formal operational thought central to Piaget’s conceptualization of this stage of development.
Piaget focused on the ways adolescents become able for the first time in their developmental history to formulate and understand complex and abstract problems, such as hypotheses and mathematical proofs building in part on the foundation of logical thinking built during the concrete operational stage of development. Adolescent cognitive development extends beyond the intellectual and academic domain into the social world, as adolescents shift their notion of self and their role in the world vis-a-vis different people. Moral reasoning and emotion regulation starts to change, and environmental factors including parenting but also peer group orientation and other external variables impacting the child’s psychosocial development. Parenting styles and cultural context have a strong bearing on adolescent development, but in general the stage is distinguished by the evolution of features like trust and autonomy, with increasing independence from the parents and deeper affiliation with peers (Plote, 2017). Adolescents become more willing or interested in risk taking behaviors, and more susceptible to pushing the boundaries of accepted norms (Plote, 2017). As the adolescent is perched on the path towards entering adulthood, issues related to identity, self-expression, and self-awareness remain especially salient.
References
Britto, P.R., Lye, S.J., Proulx, K., et al. (2017). Nurturing care: promoting early childhood development. The Lancet 389(7-13): 91-102.
Demetriou, H. (2018). Emerging empathy: A developmental perspective. Empathy, Emotion, and Education. London: Palgrave Macmillan, https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-54844-3_3
Labouvie-Vief, G. (2015) Cognitive–Emotional Development in Childhood. In: Integrating Emotions and Cognition Throughout the Lifespan. Springer, Cham, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-09822-7_5
Lantolf, J.P., Thorne, S.L. & Poehner, M.E. (2014). Sociocultural theory and second language development. In VanPatten & Williams (Eds.) Theories in Second language Acquisition, Routledge.
Lightfoot, C., Cole, M. & Cole, S. (2009). The Development of Children. New York: Worth.
McLeod, S. (2010). Concrete operational stage. Simply Psychology. https://www.simplypsychology.org/concrete-operational.html
Plote, H. (2017). Peter K. Smith: Adolescence: A Very short introduction. Adolescent Research Review 2(2017): 341-344.
Rochat, P. (2003). Five levels of self-awareness as they unfold early in life. Consciousness and Cognition, 12(4), 717–731. doi:10.1016/s1053-8100(03)00081-3