The development of a child
...han they are. Other examples include little girls sitting down and having "tea parties." They pretend to pour tea, but there is no tea present, of course. Thus, the child's imagination begins to be apparent. There are two major characteristics of the child's thoughts during this period: intuitive and egocentrism. Egocentric, in Piagetian terms, does not mean "selfish"; rather, the egocentric child has a self-centered perception of the world. Children at this stage may confuse their own feelings and thoughts with those of other people. They do not know how to sort things out. For instance, left-right and front-back confusions are observed because the child defines these words relative to their own perspective. Children will confuse their own feelings, points of view, and thoughts with those of another person. In this stage the child has the tendency to believe everything from his or her own perspective. Also in this stage the child is also intuitive, meaning that the child will go with their gut feelings, it seems right so it is right According to Freud, this child is in the anal stage, in this stage the anus is the focus of pleasurable sensations in the baby’s body, and toilet training is the most important activity. According to Eriksson this child is in the Autonomy Vs Shame and Doubt stage. In this stage children learn either to be self-sufficient in many activities, including toileting, feeding, walking, exploring, talking, or to doubt their own abilities. This child I am observing is very self-sufficient, he enjoys exploring his environment, and also he talks a lot. In the past six months, this child has developed tremendously in his language skills and activities. Every expression is in three or more words sentences. He was born at the age of thirty-four weeks. During pregnancy this baby had suffered significantly. His mother was Rhesus negative. If a mother is rhesus negative, she is supposed to received a rogam shot that would prevent the mother and baby’s blood from mixing at the placenta, which if she is not give would cause massive deterioration of the baby’s red blood cells. This mother and baby was very unfortunate because the mother had not receive the rogam during pregnancy and at five months of pregnancy, the mother had become sensitize and the baby’s red blood cells was destroyed massively causing the baby to be born by C-section prematurely. At birth the baby was severely anemic and the baby also had jaundice. He was incubated, and was given a blood transfusion to correct the problem, and was NPO (nothing by mouth) for three days. He had also undergone a lung expansion. Although this child had been through a lot as an infant, he has managed to pull through, without any complications to impact on his development. Neither the baby nor I was nervous about this interaction. Three different experiments were run to see what stage this child was in. First I took a drawing pad and I draw two rectangles; rectangle A was taller and narrower than rectangle B, which was wider and shorter than rectangle A. But when the child was asked which was the bigger one, he pointed to rectangle A. Even when I told the child that rectangle B was bigger he was still pointing to rectangle A. For the second experiment, I took two drinking glasses, one was taller, and the other was shorter but wider, when the child was asked which is bigger, he pointed to the taller glass. For the third experiment, I asked his mom to pretend that she was phoning someone, while I told the child to asked his mom for a candy. When he asked the mother for the candy, I told the mom to tell him that she was on an important call and that he will get the candy as soon as she got off the phone. The child started screaming until the mom gets off the phone to give him the candy. While observing these three experiments I went with Piaget’s theory and finds that the child is in the preoperational stage, exercising his intuitive and egocentric feelings. This child played no mind to his mom repeating that she was on an important call, he couldn’t careless, all he cared about was his self-centered f...