Journal of Child and Adolescent Behavior
Open Access

Child development involves the physical, psychological, and emotional changes from birth to the end of adolescence. Childhood can be categorized into three stages, which include early childhood, middle childhood, and adolescence. Early childhood is usually from infancy to age 6. During this period, development is most important because many milestones in life occur during this period, such as the first sentence, learning to crawl, and learning to walk. Some people speculate that mid-childhood or 6-13 years are the most critical years of a child's life, from the beginning of some formal education to the adolescence, it is also how many children begin to gain more awareness of them.

Adolescence is a stage of life, it begans at puberty and continuing through legal adulthood. In the process of development, human beings move from dependency to being more and more autonomous. This is a continuous process with a predictable sequence, but has a single lesson for every child. It will not develop at the same speed and each stage will be affected by previous development experiences. Because genetic factors in prenatal life can strongly influence developmental changes, genetics and prenatal development are generally part of child development research.

There are many definitions of the period of child development because each period is continuous and there are individual differences at the beginning and at the end. Some examples of agerelated developmental periods and defined intervals include newborns (0 to 4 weeks); infants (from 4 weeks to 1 year); babies (12 months to 24 months); preschool children (2-5 Years old); school-age children (6 to 13 years old); adolescents (14 to 19 years old). Promoting child development through parent training, and other factors, have promoted the good development rate of children. Parents play a crucial role in children's activities, social interaction, and development.

Stage Sensorimotor: (from birth to approximately two years old)

Sensorimotor skills involve the process of receiving sensory information and generating responses. This sensory information must be organized and processed to produce enough movement or response to succeed in daily tasks at home or school.

Calculations before: (approximately from the time the child begins to speak, around the age of 2)

At this stage of development, children begin to use mental symbols to analyze their environment. These symbols generally include text and pictures. When children encounter different objects, events, and situations, they will begin to apply these different symbols in their daily lives. However, Piaget mainly focuses on this stage. The reason why he calls it "re-calculation" is because the child cannot apply specific cognitive operations, such as mental arithmetic, at this time. In addition to the symbolic meaning, children began to participate in pretend games, pretending that they are not human (teacher, superhero).

Specific: (first grade to early adolescence)

At this stage, 7 to 11-year-old children use appropriate logic to develop cognitive operations and to apply this new thinking to the different events they may encounter. Children at this stage will make inductive reasoning, including concluding other observations to generalize. Different from the previous calculation stage, children can now change and rearrange mental images and symbols to form logical thinking. One example is reversibility, in which children now can reverse action by doing the opposite.