Jean Piaget, a psychologist, developed a theory called cognitive development. In the theory, Piaget proposes that every child goes through four stages as he develops and during every stage, the child uses cognitive development aspects to understand the world around him (Licht, Hull & Ballantyne, 2017). The movie Parenthood applies the Piaget’s theory to its characters. This paper will analyze Justin being in the preoperational stage, using assimilation and Todd being in the formal operational stage. Preoperational Stage The child enters the preoperational stage at the age of two and stays in the same stage until the age of six. During the preoperational stage, the child can only see the objects from his own perspective, and he can only focus on one object’s feature at a time (Oakley, 2004). In the movie, Justin appears to be in the preoperational stage because he looks like he is three years old. In one of the movie scene, a girl is using a red dotted paper to solve a math problem, and then Justin sees the red dotted paper and starts playing with it because to his perspective it looks like a toy. The same red dotted paper has numbers on the other side, but Justin decides to just focus on the red dots. Assimilation …show more content…
In one of the movie scene, viewers can see Justin eating the dots from the paper and his dad responses “Slow down Justin. I will get you some dip” which implies that the Justin is eating the dots like potato chips. He is doing that because he is using his existing schema of round potato chips to understand the similar round dots. By eating the round dots, Justin will be able to expand his schema of round dots and in the future, he will be able to differentiate between the dots and potato