Over many years, development theories have been made about the development of children and the stages they move through in order to grow and mature. There are five stages of childhood development; cognitive, physical, social & emotional and moral & spiritual. In this report, there will be a focus on three types of development theories. The three development theories that will be researched in this report are Jean Piaget (1896-1980), Erik Erikson (1902-1994) and Abraham Maslow (1908-1970).
Developmental Theory One- Jean Piaget
4.1 Jean Piaget was born on the 9th August 1896 in Neuchatel which is in the Francophone region of Switzerland. As a young boy he was always interested in biology and the natural world. He attended the University of Neuchatel and also briefly attended the University of Zurich. He didn’t study biology however. His interests changed as he became older and he graduated from university with two published papers on his thinking at that time. After he graduated he moved from Switzerland to Paris, France where he taught at a boy’s school. It was here at this school, where he was helping to mark the Binet intelligence test, that he noticed that the younger children were consistently answering the same questions wrong, which the older children were getting right. From these results he produced the theory that young children’s cognitive processes are naturally different to adults thinking.
In 1923, Piaget married and had three children, which he studied through infancy. Through the next couple of decades he became Directors and chiefs of a couple of different organizations and universities. Piaget sadly passed away on the 16th September 1980.
4.2 Piaget’s theories are focused around two areas, which are language and cognitive. His theory was split into four parts which were the sensorimotor stage, preoperational stage, concrete operational stage and the formal operational stage. These will be expanded on later on in