Common Sense Solutions: How Young Children Think

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The terms we use for describing children’s thinking come from Jean Piaget, a Swiss scientist who spent a lifetime studying this. Two important words for the young ages are preoperational and egocentric.

Preoperational tells what children cannot yet do; they cannot perform mental operations.
Egocentric tells the view from which they see everything – their own selves.

Here we look at ages about 4½ to 7, which are usually called the kindergarten ages.

You can try this Piaget experiment. Ask the child to drop a bead into a tall, narrow glass, and at the same time you drop a bead into a shallow dish. Continue dropping in beads together until the glass is almost full. Then ask, “Who has more beads, or do we have the same number?” The child is likely to answer that he has more, since his are higher. But he may answer that you have more, since yours spread out over more space. In either case he answers from the way things look to him. He cannot mentally figure out that you dropped in beads at the same time so you must have the same amount. In other words, he cannot perform the mental operations needed to solve the problem. These children answer from their own egocentric viewpoint or feeling. They rely on what they see. And in most cases, they see things only from their own viewpoint. This is called egocentrism.

Here is another Piaget game. Place a boy and a girl doll side by side on a string. You and the child face each other with the dolls between. Then set a barrier in front of the dolls, screening the child’s view. Ask which doll will come out first if you pull the string a certain direction – say to the right, the boy’s side. The child answers, you pull the string, the boy comes out, and the child can see whether or not he was correct. Ask the same question several more times and the boy always comes out. Sooner or later the child predicts that the girl doll will come out first. “Why?” you ask. “Because it’s her turn. It isn’t fair.”

In time, young children begin to see mental images of the problems. Try stringing a red, yellow, and blue bead on a wire and then place them out of sight in a tube. Review with him that the red is on the left and the blue on the right. Then give the tube one-half a rotation, a full rotation, and so forth, and each time ask the position of the beads. The younger preoperational child will be thoroughly confused, since he cannot see the beads. An older preoperational child may be able to answer as long as he can image the beads in his head. This is an advance, but it still is not logic as we know it. Logic might say that red is on the left after all even numbered turns and on the right after odd numbered turns. That, finally, would be the abstract operational stage of thinking that older people can reach.

The young children perform mental operations only on physical (concrete) objects and not on abstractions. So this is the concrete operational stage, and it usually appears somewhere around age seven. A good parallel to the idea of mental stages is the way we speak of the toddler, the child, the adolescent, the young adult, and so forth. When, exactly, does a child become an adolescent? That problem gives rise to new terms – the pre-adolescent and the early adolescent. A person might be adolescent in some attributes and quite adult in others. The lines between all these “stages” are fuzzy and there is much overlapping, yet the terms are useful to us.

There is similar overlap as children move through mental stages at ages 5 to 7. Children below 5 are largely preoperational and children above 7 are largely in the stage of concrete operations, while those in between are in the process of moving from one stage to the next. Only at older ages do people perform abstract operations.

We cannot hurry children through the stages in an adult, sequential way. We must let them grow normally. It’s a homeschooling art, not a science, to teach these young children.

Check out my article on page 29 of the funky flipbook edition of Heart of the Matter Magazine.

Debbie Strayer is a veteran educator, speaker, author and home educator. She enjoys spending time with her husband of thirty years and her grown children.

Dr. Ruth Beechick, too, has spent many years teaching and writing on education. She specializes in curriculum and in how children learn. She is mother of two and grandmother of four and loves working together with Debbie because they think alike on education matters. For more books and articles, see debbiestrayer.com.