The Founding Father

Much of what we know about the secret languages of babies and how they think, learn and communicate rest of the teaching of Jean Piaget. Although some of his ideas have since been modified or reversed by more recent research, this Swiss biologist-psychologist (1896-1980) is still regarded as the father of child development and its most influential figure. Until Piaget, scientists led by Sigmund Freud sought to understand children by looking at them backward, as adults. Piaget turned the equation around, studying their development to describe how they progressed into adulthood.
A father himself, Piaget began by carefully observing and recording the behavior of his own three children from birth to eighteen months. He recognized that children were not simply little adults or adults-in-training, but thought and behaved differently from grows-ups. As a biologist he explained some of his development in term of physical growth, including change in the brain itself. But he also described child development in psychological, social and emotional terms.
Piaget described a child’s development in four stages and sub-stages, leading to full-fledged maturation around age fifteen. It is this “stage” theory that has been most questioned. Piaget believed children started life virtually at nil. He believed, for instance, that until about age seven months, children’s senses were independent. They could not connect what they saw with what they touched or heard. Scientists have now shown that babies can unify input from different senses within the first few hours of life. Furthermore, Piaget believed that babies were not able to imitate adults’ expectations until they were four months old. It is now known that they can reproduce facial expressions as early as the first forty-two minutes of life.

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Kiester, E& Kiester, S. (2005). The Secret Languag eof Babies. The United Kingdom: Eagle Editions