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Preschoolers: Magical and Egocentric Thinking

by  Dr. Benjamin Spock

As children make the transition from being toddlers to being preschool children, the most dramatic advance is in their language skills. At the same time, their mode of thinking changes dramatically. However, even though they can sometimes sound like little adults, their thinking is far from mature.

Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget used the term "operation" to refer to an act of logic, such as could be translated into a mathematical equation. He thought of preschool-age children as "preoperational" because they do not yet use logic. Instead, they understand the world through magical and egocentric thinking.

Magical thinking

In a young child's view, it is very possible that it rains because the sky is sad. If your baby brother gets sick and goes to the hospital, it could be your fault if you were mad at him the day before. If you want something very, very badly and it happens, then your wanting caused it to happen.

These are examples of magical thinking.

Egocentric thinking

They are also examples of egocentric thinking--not that the young child is selfish. It's just that he cannot take anyone else's perspective, so that everything in the world revolves around him. When he's sad, he cries. So, it must be that the sky does, too.

(An egocentric child, on seeing his father upset, hands him his favorite teddy bear. This act shows that the child is not selfish. He is offering the thing that he finds most comforting. He cannot imagine that his father would not have the same feelings.)

The preoperational child's understanding starts and stops with what he sees. Logical rules (operations) do not yet come into play. Piaget showed this through a famous set of "conservation" experiments.

In one, he poured a tall glass of water into a low, wide dish, then poured it back into the tall, thin glass. He pointed out that no water was lost or added. Regardless, when asked which container had more, the preoperational child always chose the tall glass.

It looked like it had more, so the child was sure that it did have more. Only at the next stage would the child's perception be governed by the logical rule, that the quantity must be the same if nothing is added or taken away.

Little adults? Not at all

An understanding of preschoolers' thinking leads to an important point: Children are not just little adults.

Rather, they understand the world in a fundamentally different way than do most adults. While this can be exasperating for parents, it is a perfectly normal way for preschool children to view the world.

Interestingly, even though we adults have passed beyond the preoperational stage, we still have a connection with this earlier mode of thinking. I think this is why magic shows are so appealing to adults. They put us in touch with how we saw the world when we were children, when everything was magic.

In my experience, parents sometimes have problems with their children because they don't really appreciate how fundamentally differently they and their children see the world.

Consequently, they think their child is capable of more understanding than he really is. This is why they sometimes offer a long intellectual explanation to a two-year-old of why she should share. Although sharing is not part of any child's way of seeing the world at that stage, that doesn't mean that it won't be later on.

The next stages

As children make the transition to kindergarten and first grade, they move from the preoperational stage to a stage Piaget called concrete operations. At this stage the child uses logical rules, but only applies them to things and people in the physical (or concrete) world. It is not until adolescence when most thinking will be marked by logical operations about abstract ideas such as friendship, truth, and justice.

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