Safety and Security Needs: Egocentrism and Pre-Operational Thought
In the pre-operational stage children begin to think past the basic needs of sleep, food, water, and shelter. They seek to find out the world around them and begin to experience a need for security, love, and self-esteem. As children develop cognitively they began to understand and see things differently. Piaget’s pre-operational stage (from ages 2-7) is characterized by a lack of rationality or ability to perform mental operations. The child is able to form stable concepts as well as magical beliefs. The child however is still not able to perform operations, which are tasks that the child can do mentally rather than physically. Thinking in this stage is still egocentric, meaning the child is unable to distinguish between their own perspective and that of another person's. Egocentrism would be a child believing, "I like Barbies, so Daddy must like Barbies too."
At about 2–4 years of age, children cannot yet manipulate and transform information in a logical way; however they now can think in images and symbols. Symbolic play is when children develop imaginary friends or role-play with friends. Some examples of symbolic play include playing house, or having a tea party. Intuitive thought occurs between about the ages of 4 and 7. Children tend to become very curious and ask many questions. There is an emergence in the interest of reasoning and wanting to know why things are the way they are.
Children at the pre-operational stage are unaware of conservation and exhibit centration. Both centration and conservation can be more easily understood once familiarized with Piaget's most famous experimental task. In this task, a child is presented with two identical beakers containing the same amount of liquid. The child usually notes that the beakers do contain the same amount of liquid. When one of the beakers is poured into a taller and thinner container, children who are younger than 7 or 8 years old typically say that the two beakers no longer contain the same amount of liquid, and that the taller container holds the larger quantity, without taking into consideration the fact that both beakers were previously noted to contain the same amount of liquid. Due to superficial changes, the child was unable to comprehend that the properties of the substances continued to remain the same.
Around the age of 2 years, children develop "esteem needs," craving recognition of their own importance in the world. For Maslow, only children whose physiological, safety, belonging and esteem needs have all been met will be in a position to achieve their full potential in later life. Vygotsky believed that every aspect of children’s cognitive development is embedded in the social context. Vygotsky saw children every child as an apprentice in thinking, whose intellectual growth is stimulated and directed by mentors who are usually older and more skilled members of society. According to Vygotsky, children learn because their mentors do the following: present challenges, offer assistance, provide instruction and encourage motivation.
Vygotsky believed for each developing individual, there is a zone of proximal development, which includes all the skills the person can perform with assistance but cannot quite perform independently. The challenge for the mentor is to find appropriate challenges for the learner. Mentors provide scaffolding, or temporary support, to enable learners to move through their zone and learn new skills.
REFERENCES:
Berger, Kathleen S., Invitation to the life Span, pg. 171-178. Worth Publishers, 2010.
At about 2–4 years of age, children cannot yet manipulate and transform information in a logical way; however they now can think in images and symbols. Symbolic play is when children develop imaginary friends or role-play with friends. Some examples of symbolic play include playing house, or having a tea party. Intuitive thought occurs between about the ages of 4 and 7. Children tend to become very curious and ask many questions. There is an emergence in the interest of reasoning and wanting to know why things are the way they are.
Children at the pre-operational stage are unaware of conservation and exhibit centration. Both centration and conservation can be more easily understood once familiarized with Piaget's most famous experimental task. In this task, a child is presented with two identical beakers containing the same amount of liquid. The child usually notes that the beakers do contain the same amount of liquid. When one of the beakers is poured into a taller and thinner container, children who are younger than 7 or 8 years old typically say that the two beakers no longer contain the same amount of liquid, and that the taller container holds the larger quantity, without taking into consideration the fact that both beakers were previously noted to contain the same amount of liquid. Due to superficial changes, the child was unable to comprehend that the properties of the substances continued to remain the same.
Around the age of 2 years, children develop "esteem needs," craving recognition of their own importance in the world. For Maslow, only children whose physiological, safety, belonging and esteem needs have all been met will be in a position to achieve their full potential in later life. Vygotsky believed that every aspect of children’s cognitive development is embedded in the social context. Vygotsky saw children every child as an apprentice in thinking, whose intellectual growth is stimulated and directed by mentors who are usually older and more skilled members of society. According to Vygotsky, children learn because their mentors do the following: present challenges, offer assistance, provide instruction and encourage motivation.
Vygotsky believed for each developing individual, there is a zone of proximal development, which includes all the skills the person can perform with assistance but cannot quite perform independently. The challenge for the mentor is to find appropriate challenges for the learner. Mentors provide scaffolding, or temporary support, to enable learners to move through their zone and learn new skills.
REFERENCES:
Berger, Kathleen S., Invitation to the life Span, pg. 171-178. Worth Publishers, 2010.