A child’s mind is an amazing thing. From the moment an infant is born, her brain is growing and changing. Over the course of the first 12 years of her life, you will see your child develop complex thought and the ability to analyze and rationalize. Let’s look at some of the main characteristics you might notice at different stages:
Birth to 2. Your infant is learning from the moment she enters the world. For example, studies done with newborn infants have found that they can recognize stories that were read to them while they were in the womb. Although newborns don’t appear to be doing much other than eating and sleeping, they are amazingly intelligent.
2 to 7. Imagination drives your child during this stage. Make-believe play helps build attention span, reasoning and creativity. By playing house with your child or simply encouraging her to play dress up, you will be stimulating her cognitive growth.
But don’t expect her to be thinking like an adult yet. No matter how much you stimulate her thinking, she will still think like a kid.
7 to 12. Your child has become a logical and practical thinker, and she exercises these abilities in school.
Also, she is becoming an expert planner and can solve problems that would have been difficult for her at a younger age. For example, she loves to play games like Checkers and Battleship.
Reasoning skills, however, are limited to what she can see, touch, hear, smell and taste — meaning that she will have difficulty understanding abstract ideas that are beyond the tangible or outside her daily experience.
—Veola Vazquez
