Cognitive Development

The child's growing ability to grasp object permanence enables them to begin using mental symbols to represent objects that are not physically present — for example, children at this age commonly draw designs or figures to represent people, trees, a dog, a house, and so on, a symbolic ability that helps expand a child's mental world. This progress in symbolic thought is a central feature of what Piaget called the preoperational stage of cognitive development, which spans roughly ages 2 to 7. A salient feature of preoperational thought is egocentrism (self-focus) — children at this stage see the world only in terms of their own point of view and are not yet able to appreciate other people's perspectives. Because of this egocentrism, children commonly show animism — a tendency to think that all things are alive, in the same way they themselves are, and to attribute life-like qualities to inanimate objects; for example, a child who slips and falls while running may blame the road itself, saying something like 'the road hurt me.'

As children grow, and are roughly between 4 and 7 years of age, they want answers to constant questions — Why is the sky blue? How do trees grow? — a stage Piaget called intuitive thought, since such questions help the child begin to understand why things are the way they are. Another feature of preoperational thinking is centration — a tendency to focus on just a single characteristic or feature of a situation while understanding an event, ignoring other relevant features. For example, a child may insist on a 'big glass' of juice, preferring a tall, narrow glass over a short, broad one — even though both may actually hold the same amount of juice — because the child is centring only on the height of the glass, not on its width. …