JEAN PIAGET - THE FOUNDING FATHER OF MODERN CHILD PSYCHOLOGY

 Jean Piaget, 1896-1980 Jean Piaget, a Swiss psychologist, whose original training was in the natural sciences, spent much of his career studying the psychological development of children, largely at the Institute J.J. Rousseau at the University of Geneva, but also at home, with his own children as subjects.

The impact of this research on child psychology has been enormous, and Piaget is the starting point for those seeking to learn how children view numbers, how they think of cause-and-effect relationships, or how they make moral judgments.

He showed that rational adult thinking is the culmination of an extensive process that begins with elementary sensory experiences and unfolds gradually until the individual is capable of dealing with imagined concepts, that is, abstract thought.

By learning how children comprehend the world and how their intellectual processes mature, Piaget contributed much to the theory of knowledge as an active process in which the mind transforms reality. Put simply, Piaget described children from a perspective that no one had seen before.