Piaget's Four Stages Of Childhood Development

Infants and childhood develop at a particular manner through different aspects which ultimately complete for each other. The first aspect is physical development, that concentrate in infants’ movements and senses develop. The second aspect is cognitive development, which summarized in Piaget's theory that contains four critical stages of cognitive development. The Third aspect is the social development which can be understood by Erickson’s theory. According to Erickson's theory, children develop a sense with the needs of society. Besides these aspects, there are many factors which affect the infants and childhood development. One of this factors is parenting attitude and style in children. Direct interaction, emotional identification, and

the common assumption in psychology before Piaget's theory, it was that children are merely less competent thinkers than adults. (5) According to Piaget, children are born with the basic mental structure on which all following learning and knowledge are based. (5) Piaget's theory consists of four stages cognitive development. The first stage called Sensorimotor stage, it is from birth to two years. During this stage, infants are aware only of what is in front of them, they just pay attention to what they are seeing, doing, or physically interacting with. (6) Infants immediately start to increase their knowledge about the world through trial and error. (6) The main point of this stage is that infants develop their understanding of the existence of objects. This important landmark is also known as object permanence is an evidence that their memory is developing some symbolic abilities. (6) The second stage is Pre-operational Stage, it is from two years to seven years. Children during this stage are able to think more symbolically, and language is the most obvious term of symbolism. (7) However, their thinking is not completely logical, because they cannot transform, combine, or separate ideas. (7) The third stage is the concrete operational stage. It begins from seven years old and continues until eleven years old. The term operation is used in this stage to refer to simple calculations. Children will learn the addition, subtraction, and division. These mental operations which lead to developing the logical thinking. In addition, egocentric thinking eliminated in concrete operations stage. Children are able to understand the conservation and reversibility in this stage. (8-9) On the other hand, children will still find difficulty with operations about hypothetical and abstract concepts or deductive logic. (8-9) The formal operation is the final stage, and it