Piaget's Stages Of Child Development

Child development is a process that consists of child growth, intellectual growth, as well as psychological and emotional development. This process begins at the child’s birth and lasts until the end of its adolescent years. Child development depends strongly on the child’s environment, such as the child’s family or the child’s school and friends. In a person’s life there are seven age phases of person development. According to the book Educational Psychology from Katerina Maridaki-Kassotaki the age phases are the following. First is the infancy age which spreads from the birth of a person to the second year of its life, then it’s the toddler age which spreads from the end of the second year of a person’s life to the sixth year. Then it’s

These stages are the same for all children. Each development stage is dependent on a previous stage. However the progression of a child varies in age due to differences in the environment and therefore differences in maturation. The Piaget’s stages of development are the sensorimotor stage, the preoperational stage, the concrete operations stage and the formal operations stage. The first three stages occur during early childhood and early school age years. The final stage occurs from junior years to the middle of adolescence. The first stage is the sensimotor stage which takes place between birth and two years of age. Little children use their senses and their motion in order to understand their environment thus this step is called sensorimotor stage. Infants use mainly physical actions like sucking, grasping, hitting, watching in order to learn about their surroundings. The second stage is the preoperational stage which takes place between the ages of two and seven. The kid uses linguistic symbols, images as symbols, imitation of others, playing and using simple words in order to think and react to its environment but their thinking is illogical and it is very different from adults. In this stage children are egocentric which means that they do not have the ability to see others’ points of view and they assume that others see their environment the same way as

They analyze the children’s behavior by age and question their abilities. Piaget’s theory of cognitive development explains all the stages of development from birth to adulthood and Bandura’s theory of social learning studies the process of behavior imitation as a way of learning and exploring the surrounding environment thru rewards, benefits and penalties. Further analyzing these theories have met a lot of criticism. On the one hand, according to the behaviorists Vygotsky and Bruner there are not certain stages of development because everyone matures differently. Also Piaget did not consider the effects from social setting and culture in his theory. His experiment results are based on his own subjective interpretation of events thus making them less reliable. On the other hand Bandura’s theory has proven to be true because everyone uses model figures of behavior in order to achieve what they want. His theory is similar to the Freudian term of Oedipus complex but the child instead of imitating the same sex parent, they can imitate whoever they want even if the person does not belong in their family. Finally both of these theories have helped to understand how the children’s mind works and how they will adapt in the society using their learning, intellectual and social abilities. ( McLeod, 2009 ; McLeod,