Piaget's Characteristics of Development

When should a child be first exposed to books? When does a child first derive any benefit from books? Is it time for my child to have books of his/her own? These are questions that are asked of many children's librarians by parents eager for their children to take full advantage of all that books, reading, and literacy offers.

Jean Piaget (1896-1980)was a swiss psychologist known for his work in child development psychology. Piaget theorized four levels of development corresponding roughly to (1) infancy, (2) pre-school, (3) childhood, and (4) adolescence. Each stage is characterized by a general cognitive structure that affects all of the child's thinking and each stage represents the child's understanding of reality during that period.

In a slightly more detailed description and using Piaget's terms, the four staes look like this:
(1)Sensorimotor stage: from birth to age 2 years (children experience the world through movement and senses and learn object permanence)
(2)Preoperational stage: from ages 2 to 7 (acquisition of motor skills)
(3)Concrete operational stage: from ages 7 to 11 (children begin to think logically about concrete events)
(4)Formal operational stage: after age 11 (development of abstract reasoning).

It's interesting to note that stage 2, the Preoperational stage: acquisition of motor skills, includes being able to control eye movement from left to right and from top to bottom as well as holding a book open and turning the pages of a book. But of even more interest is the fact that in stage 1, Sensorimotor stage: children...learn object permanence, a child learns that the world is made up of permanent objects and even start to differentiate one object from another.

So, as early as stage 1, books can be a part of a child's development. Granted the development is of gross motor skills and developing a perception of their environment, two things a parent might not have thought of when asking when their child first benefits from an exposure to books, but developmentally just as important as learning the alphabet and phonetic pronounciation!

Information gathered from Piaget's Theory of Cognitive and Affective Development. Barry J Wadsworth. Longman Publishers USA. 1996 and from
Jean Piaget. (2008, March 26). In Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved 21:09, March 26, 2008, from http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Jean_Piaget&oldid=201008315