Parenting. Some research worth knowing; schema, information processing and others.

Life doesn’t come with an instruction manual. Now where have I heard that before? I actually think it does, somewhere out there amongst past and present psychological research and philosophy lies an answer. I’m not saying that this is it, but it is some things I would have liked to have known and understood sooner. There’s something about our physiology that connects us all, we all feel the same things, we experience the same emotions at different times attributing them to different, similar or same situations, we can naturally feel what each other people feel just by observing them. If you want to teach your child new information in some of the most efficient ways known to human kind, then read on. There's some video links to help clarify a couple of things for you too.

It was only three hundred years ago that the laws of physics were discovered, which were preceded by successive discoveries of the telescope, other planets with moons and the fact that the earth orbited the sun and not the other way around, essentially destroying Catholicism’s inadequate explanation for the structure of the universe and claims that God had created the universe around man placing earth at the centre. There’s a whole debate surrounding the moral issues and values that may or may not come with religion, but we’ll leave that one well alone. There have been many influential philosophers’ theories that have helped found psychology; Rene Descartes and John Locke to name a few. Locke is a personal favourite of mine; challenging the status quo of religion, aristocracy, royalty and slavery which were believed to be the natural order of nature as he believed that everyone was born equal and a blank slate, Locke believed that whatever environment we were raised in would entirely shape our behaviour. Descartes set about attempting to build a new philosophy to include science, one that would not be at odds with religion which ended up being as equally devastating to the status of the religious world view as science itself. As scientific understanding and technology advanced, the human body in the seventeenth century was beginning to be seen as a complex machine, as well as everything else in the material universe, so the first thing Descartes did was to separate the mind from the body coining the term dualism; the mind being immaterial and divine, which left it up to philosophy and religion to explain as a soul or mind could not be studied scientifically. Descartes suggested that God had given man the capabilities of studying the giant perpetual motion machine that he had created to better understand it`. Dualism was adopted by the Catholic Church in the seventeenth century under growing pressure and evidence to suggest scientific explanations for most things as opposed to what Aristotle had written around 400 BCE, which suggested that everything in the universe was made of earth, fire, wind and water. It is thanks to Descartes philosophy that we can dispel the myths surrounding the soul as further hypothesis testing by future academics has shown how knowledge, consciousness and all things that make us human can be constructed as a process of nature and rooted in our biology.   

It occurred to me that while studying some of the history of science that many of the world’s ills were already apparent over three hundred years ago and there have been large increases in the quality of human life due to scientific research. Science is a way of looking at things objectively, everything, and was founded on the basis that all knowledge must come from meticulous and careful observation, and by testing hypotheses. Science simply performs experiments based on rules and reports the results. Science isn’t just a subject or body of knowledge such as chemistry or physics, although these are areas of scientific research. Science is also the method used to develop and test rules in controlled environments and repeatable experiments, as well as reporting the results. Understanding of human development has dramatically improved over the last century, although psychology is often theoretical and complex, I’m going to explain to you some of the influential theories behind child development from past to present in a simple and concise way that will allow you to apply the theories to real life situations, i.e. you, your child or children.

I first studied psychology to get a better understanding of my own behaviour in relation to the behaviour of others, but more recently to benefit my daughter’s development. There’s a fair bit of behavioural-genetic research evidence that points towards tendencies for certain behaviours being heredity or influenced by genes such as over aggression, even then it usually takes environmental input (trauma brought on by abuse for example) for the genes to develop and behaviour to manifest, this leads many people to believe that violence and aggression are very much a normal aspects of human nature and a product of evolution, and by the rule of natural selection may still be useful in some situations. Intelligence and memory abilities however are not heredity, or at least, there’s no evidence to suggest this link exists despite many attempts at identification. Good news, eh? It’s often been argued what intelligence actually is, if it exists and if how we define it is right or wrong. For the purposes of this essay, “intelligence” refers to a good grasp of English and maths, a good attention and memory span, and a grasp of critical evaluation, the basic skills needed to maximise chances of a successful career, the child will learn most other things by its self. If you want your child to have the best possible chance of success in this world, there are a few things that we, as parents, can do to skew the odds in their favour that won’t be taught in public schools, critical evaluation is one of them, arguments for and against something like religion, capitalism or abortion for example. You can develop these evaluative skills yourself, next time you read a news story about politics for example, if you get time read a few different ones on the same subject or topic. You’ll see differences in the language used that conveys the opinion of the author and they may use different statistics or interpret statistics in different ways. You might notice (have noticed) that once you’ve read and understood a couple of different versions, your initial opinion of the event or person may change. When they’re old enough to understand of course the complexities of these theories, there’s no use in shielding them from moral issues of the world, this will help guide their moral compass and keep them fixed in reality and hopefully increase their chances of success, although expect them to mimic your behaviours and then the behaviours of others in their social world such as siblings, school friends or friends down your street. Having a grasp of morality and what’s right or wrong will make you and your child less susceptible to mirroring undesirable behaviour. Parents are encouraged to explain all reasons for disciplining their child, the danger they may be putting themselves or others in, or the consequences of their behaviour instead of saying “because I said so” as this encourages them to think about consequences, I also say things like “how would you feel if …?” when the situation arises such as a child not sharing, saying or doing mean things. I feel like I’m fighting a losing battle at times as you may be aware, they still continue to do it. But I sympathise with them, they’re emotionally charged little things at times and, and when we feel like that it’s often hard to think clearly as an adult let alone a child! Like all cognitive abilities, morality takes time and effort to develop and we'll have a look how this process of knowledge accumulation is theorised to occur shortly.

So, it’s commonly suggested that the human mind operates in a similar way to a computer, an information processer. The brain is the hardware, we are born with a full set of neurons. It is limited by its capacity to process information which substantially increases with age and can on average process seven pieces of information at one time, plus or minus two, mine being less than the latter! The software is what makes you, you, your programming, which comes from your senses and is either saved on your hard drive or discarded once it has been processed. Your consciousness, your experiences, memories etc. are all grown in this way. So how is all of this information stored you say? I’ll cover this a little bit more in depth soon. I’m sure you’ve seen plant or animal cells before, possibly even a brain cell. Brain cells, or, neurons are completely different and make up the entire nervous system, that is, the brain, brain stem, spinal cord and all nerves throughout our bodies to all of our organs and muscles to control them, and our sense organs (skin, eyes, ears, nose, mouth) so we can perceive the world. Neurons under an electron microscope show how they are not directly connected to each other, there is a small gap between connections called a synapse and electro chemicals called neurotransmitters pass messages from cell to cell. This is how the body communicates messages to and from the brain allowing us to feel and control it. There’s something like a hundred million neurons in the brain with trillions connections, research has suggested that new connections can form throughout life. Mirror neurons in the brain have shown under functional magnetic resonance image (fMRI) scans that the brain behaves in very much the same way when observing someone do something as if they were doing it themselves. This is thought to be the source of our empathy, the ability to feel what others feel and gives us our natural ability to learn by observation and is an automatic response, it happens without thinking like so many other processes. Seeing becomes doing or feeling by nature.  So, what’s the point of this you might ask?

Everything we think, believe, see, and hear, our emotions, our memories, everything we perceive as reality is the result of these chemical messages between neurons that appear to store information and these neural networks grow in complexity with age. Every time a message is sent, it gets easier for the information to be transmitted and the connection is strengthened as we remember. The opposite happens when the message is less frequently sent, the less we try to remember, the connection weakens making it more difficult to remember. So basically, every time we use our brains to observe, think about or do X, and in different ways, the more we remember it. Take this I’m writing for example, I’ll be able to remember it almost word for word for a good while after I’m finished as I’ve written it and read it numerous times, but after a year or so it will be all but forgotten as my attentions will no doubt be on other things. If I had a little look though, it’s likely that the information will come flooding back as the neural pathways will be re-established, as this is only a compilation of some knowledge I have previously acquired and rearranged using my own perspective. This in turn helps me remember aspects of some of the theories mentioned even more. This also works the same for negative thought and beliefs too.

 Challenge your child to repeat names of objects “can you say ball?” or “this is a ball!” (My daughters’ first word was dad, then mum, then “hiya!”). Once they know the names of a few things, you can challenge them to remember by saying “what’s this?” and make a game of it. It works with colours and shapes too, animals, cars, etc. and you’re not just teaching them what a ball (or whatever) is, you’re teaching them what “this is ...” and “what is this …?” mean. I consistently did this with my daughter with everything, took her for walks in her pram showing her the world and telling her what things were until she could tell me, building schemas and strengthening the neural connections in her brain. This appeals to the natural curiosity of your child and from a very early age you can instil them with the basic building blocks of knowledge this way. At the age of two my daughter is adept at asking what things are and remembering, repeating simple phrases and reciting the numbers one to ten although she has no understanding of values other than one, and two being more than one. This is the basis for her maths schema, though, I suspect this will improve very soon as I’ve taken to counting grapes as an incentive for counting them correctly. She can engage in basic conversations; usually involving sweets, going to see animals or to the park, things that she wants. Too clever springs to mind, but this can’t be a bad thing! I show her videos and pictures on my phone too of past things too to remind her and build her memory skills.

Jean Piaget (1896-1980) constructed a theory of cognitive development (development of the mind), partially through the observation of his own children. Piaget’s theory was highly influential in the field of developmental psychology and education reforms during the sixties, it showed us how children’s mental processes and development differ to adults, which appeared to mature in four distinct stages. Before this, children where just viewed as stupid or inferior to adults, and this was only during the sixties bearing in mind, we often take for granted the huge leaps humanity has achieved as normal as some of these theories trickle into mainstream society and become part of culture. Over time the child’s thinking becomes more logical and abstract, and less dependent on their immediate perception of the world. Piaget believed that children behaved like mini scientists, actively seeking to understand the world around them from birth and these four stages show large shifts in how children’s perception of the world changes. Central to Piaget’s theory is the schema (Swiss for schematic) which is a mental representation of a thought or a basic unit of a thought, a symbol (including numbers, letters and words, beliefs, all acquired learning) or an action. I’ll give you a couple of basic examples, although the news story example I gave highlights how your opinion schema of something changes when more information is added. The word hello, or hi, a basic unit of communication. The child hears a sound and learns to associate it with a greeting. Over the course of the child’s life this schema will gradually build more depth, the sound will eventually become a written word made of letters (the alphabet is another schema, as are greetings) that can be used in many different contexts as opposed to the original greeting from you. This happens with all words, they are just sounds attributed to objects, actions or people. Another example of a schema, maths and numbers. The child starts with just repeating the sequence of sounds which become numbers in order and will gradually learn to attribute the values to the sound and make mental representations of the amounts, eventually writing them down, manipulating them ... You see where this is going, right? We also have schemas about what we automatically think people are like (although research has shown how these are often wrong and based on unfounded assumptions. See attribution theory). All skills and knowledge develop this way over time, information processing from the bottom up. As new experiences occur, they are folded into the existing schema if they fit. If they cannot be assimilated then the existing schema may be altered or a new schema created to accommodate the new experience. Schemas help us organise our past experiences as well as make sense of new ones. Children build schemas in an effort to adapt to their environment.

The four stages of development discussed are; sensorimotor (0-2 years), pre-operational (2-7), concrete operation (7-11) and formal operation (11+), bearing in mind the theory is based on a sample used which included Piaget’s own children and a small group of well off parents children. During the sensorimotor stage, an infant’s knowledge is limited to their sensory perception of the world and they utilise the skills they were born with (looking, sucking, grasping and listening) to learn about the environment. Piaget believed that infants at this stage cannot think about absent objects using mental images and object permanence gradually develops with age. Piaget believed this was the most important part of the sensorimotor stage, a partial understanding of object permanence. Object permanence is the understanding that although objects are no longer visible, they still exist. Think; peekaboo! Popping in and out of existence. Piaget argued that infants of this age still did not fully comprehend object permanence due to them making the A not B error. Two boxes were placed in front a child and a treat is placed in box A. The child understands that the treat is in box A and will open it to retrieve it. If the child is then shown the treat being put into box A then switched to box B, the child continues to search for the treat in box A.

The next stage of development, the pre-operational stage (2-7), is characterised by a shift in thinking that allows representational use of symbols, words and images to think about absent things. One of the hallmarks of this stage is the development of language and the difference between words the child can understand and actually speak gradually reduces towards the end of this stage, although Piaget noted that during this period, children cannot understand concrete logic, cannot mentally manipulate information and are unable to take the viewpoint of others (egocentrism). Their abilities to use symbols as mental representations of thought increase exponentially and can become detached from their meanings, as indicated by the increase in the amount of abstract pretend (make-believe) play they engage in (using a banana as a phone for example). Piaget believed that they found it difficult to distinguish between the two, although this has also been discredited as will be addressed shortly. The inability to conserve also highlights the rigidity of mental operations at this age. Conservation is the understanding that something stays the same quantity, even though it may change in appearance. One experiment that demonstrates this is; two pint glasses full of water with equal amounts in, the children can grasp that they contain the same amount, yet when one is poured into a taller thinner glass, some children at this stage perceive this as being an increase in amount as it appears to look larger. Also, a play dough ball being squashed into a flat circle works in much the same way. 

The concrete operational stage (7-11) is characterised by an ability to think logically about concrete objects and thinking is no longer dominated by physical appearance, as demonstrated by the ability to conserve, although children at this stage have difficulty understanding abstract or hypothetical concepts i.e. can only reason how the world is, not how it could be. Piaget determined that concrete operational children have a good use of inductive logic which involves going from a specific experiences to form a general principle. Children at this stage tend to struggle with deductive logic, which involves using a general principle to predict the outcome of a specific event. Reversibility is the understanding and awareness that actions and schemas can be reversed or linked and is another important observation made by Piaget. For example a child should now be able to recognise that their dog was a Labrador, a Labrador is a dog and a dog is an animal, three different schemas that represent the same thing. Children should now be able to categorise objects, count, measure, add and subtract. The child can now engage in decentration when solving a problem, that is, they can think about more than one dimension of the problem as compared to pre-operational children. Decentration has implications for conservation tasks and other intellectual undertakings. The child is now sociocentric and understands that other people have differing perspectives on the world to their own.

The formal operational stage (11+) is the final stage of Piaget’s cognitive development and begins at around age twelve and lasts into adulthood. It is characterised by the ability to think about abstract concepts, a good grasp of logical thought, deductive reasoning and systemic planning can also emerge at this stage. Adult like hypothetical thinking and a capacity for scientific thinking, isolating variables, predicting outcomes and can reason about what the world could and should be like. Instead of relying on past trial and error experiences as in the case of earlier stages, children can now systematically solve a problem without the use of actual concrete objects and have the ability to think about different solutions to a problem before acting. The individual can now avoid potentially unsuccessful attempts at solving a problem using the past experience, present demands and future consequences in an attempt to maximise the chances of success and adaptation to the world. The ability to use formal operations varies a great deal between people and it has been argued that these skills sometimes fail to develop at all although as we have seen, you can teach an old dog new tricks if they want to be taught.

Piaget’s theory has its limitations and has been subject to criticism, although Piaget himself acknowledged that he was only laying down a rough sketch of human cognitive development. Much of Piaget’s theory was based on observations of his own children in their everyday surroundings and a small sample of high socioeconomic status, an obvious “flaw” from a scientific point of view, although most research to date has shown that claims made by Piaget about the sensorimotor stage appear to be false. It is important to remember that before this, children were commonly thought of as stupid and learned everything through reward and punishment only. An experiment was set up using a model train with a section of the track obscured from view behind a screen. When the train went behind the screen, the children looked to where the train would emerge in anticipation. This suggests that object permanence may exist during the sensorimotor stage in children as young as 3.5 months old. This may also suggest that either children may be born with an innate understanding of the physical world, the solidity of objects, possibly developed in the womb by touching its self and pushing on the outside of the womb, or has the ability to learn much faster than an adult. This idea was developed and the idea of an innate core knowledge at birth is widely accepted in developmental psychology circles today, as this research and other methods continue to provide similar results consistently. Some have argued that these extrapolations go far beyond these findings. Research has also suggested that a child’s brain is highly adapted to accept language and is evolved for fast learning. What do you think?

Modern research suggests that a shift to a higher stage may not be universal amongst children and more subjective due to the tasks set and their familiarity. Performance appears to depend on the task given. Children as young as three are able to distinguish the difference between a real and pretend dog and may not be as egocentric as thought by Piaget. How a child approaches the task matters, counting objects helps conservation of numbers and children are more likely to conserve if they are trained to focus on relevant dimensions. Familiarity and relevance to social and cultural background appears to effect development. In cultures that value pottery skills, conservation of mass emerges earlier in children than those from other societies. Also, inner city children struggled with conservation tasks when presented as a scientific experiment, but when presented as a ‘con-artist trick’ their performance improved. Task performance can simply vary from day to day and Robert Seigler argued that children select from a range of strategies when faced with a difficult problem, eventually figuring out the best strategies. Due to this, there is a gradual increase in probability of success rather than the abrupt changes proposed by Piaget.

Generally speaking, cognitive development does appear to occur in stages, although slow and incrementally as opposed to sudden changes. Remember the information processing view? It still views cognitive development as general cognitive change, but differences in abilities are due to variations in knowledge and experience in particular areas/subjects that have been built up over time from the bottom up. The information processing approach views the mind as a complex system of logical rules and limitations, much like a computer (if/then rules). Information enters via the senses (sight/sound/touch) and is then encoded into the short term/working memory or long-term memory depending on its importance. Short-term and long term-memory capacities increase with age as more connections between neurons form, as does the knowledge base of the child. As the knowledge base grows, this makes new information easier to assimilate. Especially if information is familiar or relevant, new information can be connected to existing knowledge and arranged hierarchically making it easier to understand and retrieve. Information can be “chunked” so it can be remembered more easily. Imagine if I read you a ten number sequence and then asked you to write them down in the correct order, chances are, you’d remember seven, plus or minus two. However, if I then asked you to do the same again but gave you ten different digits in two groups of five, you’re only trying to remember two chunks of information as opposed to ten and you’d remember them with ease. It works, try it. I do it with phone numbers and also revision notes for exams. Once I’ve written all of my revision notes, I draw a mind map (spider diagram) outlining the main points of whatever theories I’ve been learning, once I can remember the main points by picturing them on the mind map in my head, that’s usually enough to help me recall the rest, the order they are in too helps trigger the memories. It’s really surprising what a few years of intensive brain training such as A-levels or a degree can do for your short term memory capacity, at any age too as new connections between neurons form throughout life. You don’t need education, though, you can teach yourself to be better at critical evaluation skills. This will definitely improve your brain power, forget those silly games and apps that have been developed using these concepts, just read more than one newspaper/story perspective, read more books, watch different types of programs on TV. Open your mind and widen your perspective, break the routine, you’re not exercising your brain this way.

Whilst Piaget viewed the cognitive development of a child in isolation and stressed the importance of self-initiated discovery, Lev Vygotsky (1896-1934) proposed that the sociocultural environment had a profound effect on the child’s thinking. According to Vygotsky, much important learning comes from social interaction with a skilful tutor which may provide verbal instructions (referred to as co-operative or collaborative dialogue) or model behaviour. The child seeks to understand the instructions or actions of the tutor then internalises the information using it to guide or regulate their own behaviour. The more knowledgeable other (MKO) and zone of proximal development (ZPD) are two major aspects of Vygotsky’s theory. The MKO refers to someone who has a better understanding or higher ability than the learner, not always necessarily a parent or teacher. In fact it may need not be a human source of information, the internet for example. The ZPD differentiates between what the child can achieve independently, and what they can achieve with guidance from the MKO. Learning takes place within the ZPD, and support is gradually reduced until the child gets better at the task. Imagine a young child with a jigsaw puzzle that had never played with one before. According to Piaget the child would eventually solve the puzzle through trial and error (if they didn’t get bored!), Vygotsky, however, would suggest that the parent show the child some basic principles such as how the pieces fit together and placing the flat edges of the outside pieces down first. Vygotsky’s theories are not as widespread as Piaget’s due to his notes not being translated until more recently, Vygotsky was Russian.

In conclusion, Piaget’s theory was highly influential in educational reforms and developing and the structure of the schooling system in the UK, but as we have seen it has its limitations. Don’t worry if your child’s development is slightly behind at first, all that this theory does is give us a rough estimate of where our children need to be when they get into high school and current research has suggested that the stages are not universal and progress is more determined by input stimulus, i.e. learning. You should aim to have your child outperforming these standards though as they are pretty low as research has suggested. If you’re reading this, it’s great that you’re taking an active interest in educating your child and not leaving it up to schools, society and television to shape your child’s schemas. Television is a great way to pacify an active child when you need to focus your attentions elsewhere for short periods of time, I’ve used it, and you may do too. Too much television is definitely a bad thing, at least aim to engage in some sort of educational play at least once per day, playing with toys, explaining shapes and colours, even if it takes a week or however long to just learn one thing, once they've learnt it move on to something else, get them used to the learning process and following instructions. Schemas could be said to be a mental representation of the neurons forming connections in the brain. It takes a few years of hard work, persistent repetition, but most importantly patience and understanding that it does takes time to build up a knowledge base of schemas that will have started from the very basic level of learning, which you will have taught yourself!

Once the basic blocks are programmed, your kids are set for life and if you continue to nurture them by constantly advancing their learning as far as you possibly can, you’ll maximise their chances of success. At the very least, plan to equip your child with the basic tools they will need to thrive in school. As I have already said, there is no reason whatsoever that you and your child can’t continue to learn and discover new things throughout your lives, and cognitive abilities can be increased with repeated practice and are not reduced by any biological predispositions, unless of obvious genetic or dispositional conditions. My advice to you would be; plan, be polite, be persistent and be prepared, as getting it right from an early age will be highly beneficial and rewarding for both of you. Keep on feeding them information and explaining how the world works. They learn a lot by themselves, by using the information already present to interpret the world unfolding around them. You’ll see the schemas slowly emerge and gradually gather more depth and understanding, finally being linked together to form coherent behaviour which is less and less dependent on your input. It truly is an amazing process and engineering feat of evolution.

Is any of this valid? I often wonder myself. If you believe that we are a species of animal and don’t particularly believe in a god then yes, it’s important and you need to know. Think about how a better understanding of the human body has led to a greater understanding of our biology, treating diseases, operations, drugs etc. We now take it for granted that we know what a cold is and how to get treatment for illnesses, self-diagnosis is just a google click away these days! So surely, a better understanding of the workings of your own mind can maximise the potential of your brain. I feel that it worked a treat for me! Sure, psychology isn’t an exact science like physics, biology of chemistry, but does this make it any less valid? Who would you trust to raise your child? God? The government? A teacher? Teachers are well aware of the psychological processes of learning as it is part of their training, but they are constrained by politics, procedures, curriculum, targets and the class sizes they have to deal with. Also, they’re only human and I imagine teaching to be a very demanding career from what I’ve seen. A difficult child who does not want to be helped in school will not and cannot be helped, I’ve seen this happen. Get it right from a very early age and it makes everyone’s life easier in the long run. Thanks for reading.