How well do you understand your child's development?

It can be difficult to discern what young children know and don’t know. Even developmental psychologists can be wrong about the capabilities of very young children. But did you know that it’s possible to study the psychology of young children, and even of infants who cannot yet speak or crawl? Research in this area can help caregivers understand how best to support the children in their care and enable them to grasp every learning opportunity.

How adults underestimate children’s abilities

It’s easy to underestimate what children are capable of accomplishing when they are very young. For example, we might think that a child’s language isn’t very developed, based on how little they can verbalize. For this reason, it was widely accepted that infants don’t start learning words until at least 9 months of age. But over the last decade, studies have found that infants know the meanings of commonly heard nouns like “cup” before they begin speaking. Infants look at objects named by their parents when they are as young as 6 months of age, showing that they know what these words refer to.

Another common misconception about children’s development dates back to the 1950s, when the psychologist Jean Piaget posited that young children do not think about objects they cannot see. According to Piaget, when an object is not in sight, the child believes it has disappeared from the world. However, we now know that infants will follow a moving object with their eyes when it disappears behind a barrier, and even look in anticipation towards where the object will come out. It is clear that they can track hidden objects at 3 months, the earliest possible age at which this can be measured.

It may also come as a surprise that children are prewired to be social and understand others. Six-month-olds understand other people’s goals and prefer people who help others reach those goals over people who impede them or do nothing. And as soon as children are able to walk, they spontaneously help others achieve their goals.

“Six-month-olds understand other people’s goals and prefer people who help others reach those goals over people who impede them or do nothing.”

Infants are capable of amazing feats in the realm of mathematical reasoning. While geometry and arithmetic are not typically taught to children until the school years, preschool-aged children display precocious navigation abilities using simple maps, and they understand the geometric properties of shapes. Infants also have some accurate intuitions about numbers; 5-month-olds are able to understand simple addition and subtraction of small numbers of objects.

How adults overestimate children’s abilities

At the same time, it is easy to overestimate what children are capable of in other areas, and therefore to misunderstand their behavior. Children often say words before they understand their meaning. By age 3, for example, most children will talk about events that happened yesterday or that will happen tomorrow. At that age, however, “tomorrow” can mean any time in the future, and “yesterday” can mean anything that is not happening now. Only when children reach school-age do they begin learning the correct meanings of these words.

Even older children who are adept at communicating may have problems understanding the thoughts and feelings of others. In what is known as the “Sally–Anne task,” children are told that Sally has hidden a cookie, but that Anne has moved it to another hiding spot without Sally’s knowledge. Although children understand the story, they wrongly expect Sally to go to Anne’s hiding spot to get the cookie – after all, that’s where the cookie is! It takes them until the age of 6 to understand that others have beliefs about the world (where the cookie is, for example) that differ from their own.

“Even older children who are adept at communicating may have problems understanding the thoughts and feelings of others.”

Many adults think that even at the age of 2, children understand the words for the numbers one to ten, because they are able to recite them while pointing to objects, ending by emphasizing the word that corresponds to the number of objects. Yet young children typically first learn these words as part of a routine or game, and actually comprehend only a small subset of these words (one to four). It is not until later that they understand that each number word represents a quantity, and that each additional number in the sequence past four represents “one more.”

Understanding development helps adults support children

Research in developmental psychology is an important tool that helps us gain a better understanding of what children are capable of and how we can best support them throughout their lives. Parents who know more about child development tend to engage their children in longer conversations and to use more varied vocabulary, both of which have been linked to children’s early cognitive development. Fortunately, we are learning even more through technological advances like infant brain imaging. We are also developing new ways to assess infants at home, with the help of tools such as experiments at a distance and home recordings using wearable technology, paired with automatic speech analysis. Our capacity for understanding the minds of young children grows rapidly every year, and armed with this expanding knowledge, caregivers can give children even more opportunities to thrive.

“Parents who know more about child development tend to engage their children in longer conversations and to use more varied vocabulary.”

Takeaways

• Your child might already know something even if they do not express it as an adult would.
• What your child does or says does not always reflect the same knowledge or reasoning that an adult would have.
• Your child might engage in a behavior without the same understanding as an adult.
• Knowing more about child development can help you support your child’s development.