Piaget's theory, as we saw in the previous topic, tries to find common patterns in the development of children's intelligence, especially analyzing how the structures of thought evolve in a logical and quite predictable sequence if the child does not suffer from health problems or traumas that make it difficult. Piaget distinguishes four stages in the child's development.
Logic, the understanding of the self as being autonomous and in relation to the environment, the concepts of time, space, quantity and relationship, together form a part of an evolutionary process in their cognitive abilities and abilities.
The first of these stages is the senso-motor and it happens from birth to two years. At this stage, through the gradual control of his movements, the child can reach the conscious and voluntary movement, which makes him carry out activities aimed at his relationship with the environment.
As you advance in your motor control The child is discovered as a being separated from the environment, different. Discover your own existence and recognize the existence of others and the rest of the objects and spaces.
In the first months the child can barely be aware that he is a different being from his mother, so any separation from that part of himself causes him enormous anxiety, given a situation that his perceptions and knowledge do not allow him to discern as safe .
The child begins to explore the environment through your senses and he discovers naturally that objects and people are something other than himself, assimilating their physical properties by touching, sucking, smelling and listening to them. Learn so that there are hard and soft things, cold and hot, with shapes, textures and flavors. Everything is very new and takes time.
At this stage the people with whom you establish affective bonds, his mother first and others that are added little by little later, have an enormous importance in his development not only intellectual, but emotional and emotional, because they are the reference he has for all his processes and from those he receives, through physical contact and the signs of love, all the recognition of himself and the environment.
As the months go by, the child responds to these signs of affection with great intensity and his need for permanent and personalized human contact does not diminish in that time, being always of great importance for him to be close to those attachment figures.
In this first of the four stages of child development according to Piaget, it is the affection that guides their learning and their interests, being the stimulus for the new advances, being at this stage the most important thing that the baby has a safe emotionally and adequate environment to be able to exercise his senses and his psychomotor skills.
