Understanding Individuality And Child Development And Development Of Jean Piaget

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Piaget Jean Piaget had a very difficult childhood. He had a cold, distant father and a mentally ill mother. Her condition contributed towards a troublesome marriage and family life. Piaget himself had two nervous breakdowns in his youth. He was not especially close to his other siblings or have close friends of his own age, and depended upon older mentors and self-study to grow his learning. The Swiss culture that emphasized on individuality and freedom perhaps led Piaget to focus on learning from an individual standpoint rather than exploring the group influences on learning. (Pass, 2004) He combined his interest in biology with his interest in philosophy and began exploring the world from the age of 11 years old. (Sigelman & Rider, 2017) Over the next few decades of his life, Piaget worked towards understanding cognitive development in children. He viewed intelligence as a process that allows an individual to adjust to his/her environment. This adjustment involves a process of active construction of understanding of the world based on interactions with it. Children are not born with an innate understanding of the way …show more content…

Additionally, he termed these stages ‘invariant sequence’, implying that children progress through the levels in the suggested order, without skipping or regressing to earlier stages. (Sigelman & Rider, 2017) This theory can best be characterized as a stage theory. This implies that the development in children occurs in stages, and that the advancement to a higher stage is based on the completion of tasks of the previous stages. (Johnson, 2014) However, taking into account factors like heredity, environment, and experiences for cognitive simulation, different children may progress through these stages at different paces. The four stages are: sensorimotor stage (0-2 years old), pre-operational stage (2-7 years old), concrete operational stage (7-11 years old), formal operations stage (11-12 and

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