Better understand child development

Since the last century, researchers such as Walloon, Vygotsky, Piaget and Bruner highlighted milestones in the development of the child, the importance of action on the child's environment and the interactions, including in mastery of language.

More recent work has shown however that development is uneven, nonlinear, it has also stagnation and even regression, and the concept of stage of development has been questioned. Capacity and many complexes have been demonstrated in infants, in the way they experience the physical and the psychological world, thanks to new methods of investigation.


The development does not systematically from concrete to abstract and discrepancies arise depending on the types of problems that children have to solve: the variability, inter and intra-individual, is a fundamental feature of development, and child must not only build new learning strategies, but also inhibit the previous strategies.

Other work has provided a better understanding of how children construct not only representations of the physical world, but also a "theory of mind", that is to say a representation of desire, knowledge, beliefs of others. They also enabled rethinking the relationship of children's imagination and how fiction can help them solve problems and think logically.

It is in the interaction between development and learning, with guidance from the teacher, the child will develop, build concepts, develop its language in connection with the development of motor skills, emotional and social.