Childhood Development

Childhood Development: The Crucial Years

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The most crucial part of an individuals’ development is in their very young years. A baby is born with almost no knowledge of the surrounding environment; they must learn everything about everything that surrounds them, using the little abilities they have mastered, such as touch and taste. As they grow and experience more of the world, they learn more and more about the society we live in and what acceptable behavior is. If children are deprived of these simple wonders and curiosities, they might miss the crucial stages of learning and understanding important aspects of life. During these crucial years, children often have difficulty grasping concepts that come easy to adults, such as understanding that a picture is a mere representation of the object it looks like; a concept of dual representation. This concept is a major key in how a person views comparative situations and captures the beginnings to the complex thinking of an adult. Children, especially young children, have a complex way of viewing the world; a view much different than most adults.

When people think about children, they first think of miniature adults; small versions of ourselves. In a physical perspective, this might be true, but in the cognitive perspective, people fall very short of the truth. Children change very rapidly comparatively, and their cognition changes just the same. Jean Piaget was a developmental psychologist who first discovered that children are very different than adults. According to Piaget, there are four distinct stages of development in which children grow and learn. The first is the sensorimotor stage, from ages birth-two, in which children experience the world through the senses and actions: looking, hearing, touching, mouthing, grasping, etc. (Myers, 2011). During this stage, children development the concepts of object permanence; that an object still exists even if it is out of...