Development of Intelligence in Children 0-5
There are four recognized stages of cognitive development in children, as developed and researched by Jean Piaget. Piaget’s research focused on both how children acquire knowledge and on the nature of intelligence itself. His research also relies on schema theory, claiming that all knowledge is organized into units, and that these units build upon one another to create knowledge and cognitive development. Children in their first five years of life will pass through the sensorimotor and preoperational stages. The last two stages, concrete operational and formal operational, are reached after ages seven and twelve, respectively.
The sensorimotor stage takes place from birth to two years old. In this phase, infants use the skills they were born with in order to interact with and gain knowledge of their environment. This phase relies heavily on trial-and-error and is where children create their first schema of environment. This stage is so called because children rely heavily on their motor skills and five senses – sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell – in order to participate in these kinds of trial-and-error experiments. Within the sensorimotor stages, there are several substages that infants will travel through before moving on to the preoperational stage.
In the first month of life, the infant will rely purely on their reflexes; these include sucking, startling, and looking. These reflexes will disappear once the infant reaches In the first 4 months, you can expect the infant to participate in primary circular reactions – they will try to replicate an experience that happened by accident earlier because it feels pleasurable to them. For example, they might wiggle their fingers or suck their thumb accidentally and then later intentionally repeat the action to try and recreate the feeling. During the next substage, which should last from 4-8 months, the child will begin initiating secondary circular reactions to experiment with the environment around them. These will include objects outside of their own body; they might pick up a toy or shake a rattle to hear the sound it makes.
Between 8 and 12 months, tertiary circular reactions will begin, largely revolving around trial-and-error experimentation to try and create a reaction from their environment. They might participate in different actions or make different sounds to get attention from a caregiver. In the last substage, which will take place between 18 and 24 months, the child will develop a sense of object permanence- the concept that objects still exist even when they aren’t in the child can’t hear or see them- and early representational thought. Early representational thought refers to the ability to represent objects with symbols; it is intrinsically linked with language acquisition.
During these substages, the caregiver can help the child develop through providing a stimulating environment; they can read books, listen to music, and talk to the baby often. This will help them as they begin to acquire language. Repetition in these stages might seem boring, but too much variance will prevent the child from learning; rather, repeated actions help the infant to learn. Allow your child to take the lead in play at this stage; their own ability to participate in trial and error experiments is crucial.
Between the ages of 2-5, the child will move on to the preoperational stage of cognitive development. While they don’t yet understand logic, they begin to think symbolically – they understand, for example, that an object can stand in for something else during play. During this phase, they are also not yet able to understand other perspectives and are largely ego-centric (meaning focused on themselves).
Play at this stage is particularly important. Role playing can help the child move away from their egocentrism; by playing dress-up and pretending to be someone else, they are able to begin to understand the way other people exist in the world. Tactile games will also help your child understand symbolic representation; at this stage, you can begin laying the groundwork for their phonemic awareness (knowledge that letters create sounds) by giving them letter shaped blocks or magnets to play with, or shaping clay or play-do into letters.
It’s important to keep in mind that all children reach these stages at slightly different times. While it’s good to keep these milestones in mind, rather than focusing on an exact timeline, watch instead for general trends.
