Piaget Preoperational Stage Comprehensive Nursing Essay Paper Example

Piaget Preoperational Stage Comprehensive Nursing Essay Paper Example

The preoperational stage is Piaget’s theory of cognitive development second stage. It begins at around age two years to around seven years. The children in this stage apply symbolic thinking while not using their cognitive operations. The child’s preoperational thinking does not use logic or transform to combine or separate ideas (Cherry, 2021). The development process involves building experience of their world through adaptation and moving towards the concrete stage that will require logical thinking. At the end of the preoperational stage, the child can represent events and objects mentally and get involved in symbolic play.(Piaget Preoperational Stage Comprehensive Nursing Essay Paper Example)

The core features of the preoperational stage include centration, egocentrism, play, symbolic representation, pretend or symbolic play, animism, artificialism, and irreversibility. Centration is a child’s tendency to engage in one aspect of a situation at a time. Focusing on more than one aspect of the case at one time presents decentering challenges. The children struggle to think about more than one situational aspect simultaneously, which occurs in social and non-social contexts. Egocentrism is the child’s inability to view a circumstance from another person’s perspective (McLeod, 2018). The children assume that other individuals perceive, see, hear, and feel situations entirely like they do. Children in the preoperational stage have typical egocentric thoughts and communications as they primarily think about themselves. Early in this stage, the children tend to engage in parallel play, which involves being in the same play area with other children but playing next to them, not with them. The child is often absorbed in their private world and egocentric speech, which is manly externalizing their thoughts rather than communicating with the others. The child is yet to understand and acquire social language skills and rules.(Piaget Preoperational Stage Comprehensive Nursing Essay Paper Example)

Children in this stage predominantly use symbolic representation, using other things that include words or objects to describe or symbolize something else. They mainly display language symbolism, which, according to Piaget, merely represents what the child already knows rather than cognitive development. Piaget believes children contribute little too new knowledge. According to this theory, cognitive development promotes language development, not the other way round (McLeod, 2018). The children also tend to engage in pretend or symbolic play, pretending to be people or characters they are not. They pretend to be superheroes, policemen, and other characters they desire or interact with the most, playing roles with props that symbolize real-life personalities or objects. They can also create an imaginary character to play with. Symbolic play involves children advancing their cognitions regarding people, things, and actions to construct an increasingly sophisticated representation of their world. Towards the end of the preoperational stage, the children’s egocentrism declines, and they begin to enjoy playing with other children in their games. They start learning how to regulate their relations with other children and orient to the rules of socialization.(Piaget Preoperational Stage Comprehensive Nursing Essay Paper Example)

The children in this stage play more with inanimate objects, including toys and teddy bears, believing they possess human feelings and intentions (McLeod, 2018). Piaget describes animism as a preoperational child’s belief that the natural world is alive, conscious, and purpose. Piaget highlights four stages of animism:(Piaget Preoperational Stage Comprehensive Nursing Essay Paper Example)

• From 2 years to the age of 4 or 5 years, children believe that everything has life and a purpose.
• From 5-7 years, they believe that only objects that move have a purpose.(Piaget Preoperational Stage Comprehensive Nursing Essay Paper Example)
• Between 7 and 9 years, they believe that only objects that move spontaneously have life.
• Between 9 and 12 years, the child understands that only plants and animals have life.

Artificialism is also an essential feature of the preoperational stage and involves the belief that specific environmental aspects like clouds and skies are manufactured by people (McLeod, 2018). Irreversibility is also present in this stage and entails the children’s inability to reverse the direction of a sequence of events to previous activities or where they started. (Piaget Preoperational Stage Comprehensive Nursing Essay Paper Example)

Children in early childhood development a theory of mind to describe the world around them. The theory-theory phenomenon demonstrates the child’s growing maturation. However, the child’s immediate environment or nurture is more pivotal to their development in this stage. The theory of mind is also influenced by the child’s interaction with parents, siblings, and peers, explaining why children with older siblings mature faster than younger siblings (American Psychological Association, 2019). Later in this stage, children begin to understand things from other people’s perceptive and recognize other people’s emotions and desires. They experience a crucial shift in their mental processing by five, which Piaget describes as diminishing egocentrism. Piaget explains that children in the preoperational stage add little to the existing or new knowledge. The thinking process in early childhood is influenced by what the children already know, and they are open to suggestions, which affects their memory retention. They mostly learn through existing knowledge by transforming or revising the knowledge in a process called conceptual change. Early childhood thinking also involves the children’s primary focus on one main or essential thing, which according to Piaget, is the inability to decenter, conserve, or comprehend seriation (Bashrin, 2015). They cannot carry out inclusion tasks or reverse the sequence. The aspect of centralization can be observed in their inability to differentiate length and number or size and number. For instance, a child with two small half bananas thinks he has more than the one with one large banana. Piaget provides that the preoperational child’s inability to decenter contributes to their egocentrism.(Piaget Preoperational Stage Comprehensive Nursing Essay Paper Example)

References

American Psychological Association. (2019, October).  Thinking and Learning: Top twenty principles for early childhood education.(Piaget Preoperational Stage Comprehensive Nursing Essay Paper Example)

Bashrin, S. D. (2015). Piaget’s preoperational stage in children: a comparative study (Doctoral dissertation, BRAC University).

Cherry, K. (2021, July 30). The Preoperational Stage of cognitive development. https://www.verywellmind.com/preoperational-stage-of-cognitive-development-2795461(Piaget Preoperational Stage Comprehensive Nursing Essay Paper Example)

McLeod, S. (2018). The Preoperational Stage of cognitive development. simple psychology. https://www.simplypsychology.org/preoperational.html(Piaget Preoperational Stage Comprehensive Nursing Essay Paper Example)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/