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Although all of the Theories of Development make sense to me in one way or another, the theory I relate most to and which makes the most sense to me is Piaget’s Theory of Cognitive Development. I am more able to pull examples from my own personal life and easily fit them into each of Piaget’s four stages.
Thinking back to when my son was an infant, I remember hiding behind a wall or a couch and then jumping out and saying “peek-a-boo”. At the beginning of the game my son would whine and cry as soon as I hid and he could no longer see me and once I came out of hiding he would smile and laugh. After a while of playing this game, he would no longer whine and cry but just sit quietly and wait for me to reappear again. I realize now that what I considered to be a simple game of peek-a-boo was actually a major milestone in my child’s learning ability. He was demonstrating what Piaget refers to as object permanence in his sensorimotor stage.
Once my son was into his toddler years, he would take various objects and substitute them for something else. For example, he would pick up a remote control and hold it up to his ear and pretend it was a telephone. Or he would take a notepad and a pencil and pretend to be taking my order like they do at a restaurant while also pretending to punch the keys on a calculator which he called his computer. This would all be examples of symbolic function which falls into Piaget’s 2nd stage, the preoperational stage.
My son is currently 10 years old is having the hardest time with math; math word problems to be exact. He can understand it to an extent, but for some reason he’s unable to think logically about what he’s reading. If it’s a “what if” question and it doesn’t apply to something he can see for himself, he has a hard time grasping the concept and solving the problem. Piaget refers to this type of problem in his 3rd stage, the concrete operations stage. Although my son is able to understand the concept of...