The Theories Of The Three Stages Of Childhood Development

Theorists such as Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, Erik Erikson, Sigmund Freud, and Lawrence Kohlberg have studied and documented information about the stages of childhood development. The three main stages of childhood development are early childhood, middle childhood and adolescence. Each stage contains developmental behaviors and characteristics of different age groups. However, the childhood development stage that this paper is focus on is the middle childhood stage. During this phase in a child’s life, they go through a variety of changes. Such changes include; physical, cognitive, social and emotional changes. According to this course text, HDEV (2010), middle childhood comprises children between the ages of 6 to 12 years. In addition, in relation to the information that is presented in this text about the

Jean Piaget theorizes that children go through four different stages in cognitive development; sensorimotor stage, preoperational, concrete operational, and formal operational. He states that by age 7, a child belongs to the concrete operational stage. At this time they begin to think logically like adults do, moving away from abstract thoughts to concrete thoughts. Additionally, children acquire the skill of reversibility. For example, adding 6 and 3 gives you 9. A child in the concrete operational stage would know that since 6 and gives you 9, then subtracted from 9 would give you 6 or 6 subtracted from 9 would give you 3. Therefore, they are able to show flexibility. Children are also aware of persons having different perspectives. Whereas, children are less self-centered and are open to other viewpoints. Here they are able to focus on more than one aspect of given object or situation (decentration). With Piaget’s conservation tasks, children are able to recognize that objects remain the same no matter how they are