Driving Home:  Parental Commuting and Symptoms of Teen Depression Part 4

Originally published in 1999 as the doctoral dissertation:

Driving Home:  Parental Commuting and Depressive Symptoms in Young Adolescents

The following corresponds to pages 41-55 in the hardcopy dissertation:

Salient Features of Early Adolescent Development

Cognitive Development and the Emotional Experience of the Early Adolescent

Piaget’s View of Pre-adolescence and Adolescence

            Piaget delineates four distinct periods of cognitive development.  As summarized by Flavell, Miller, and Miller (1993), Piaget’s defined stages are as follows.  The sensorimotor period spans ages 0-2 and is characterized by understanding the world by overtly acting upon it.  The motor actions of infants reflect sensorimotor schemes or generalized action patterns for  understanding the world (e.g., the sucking scheme).  Schemes become more differentiated and integrated such that the two-year old can form mental representations of reality.  The preoperational period (ages 2-7) is characterized by more rapid, flexible thinking that is socially shared and does not rely on motor actions to think about objects and events.  Instead, children use representations such as mental images, drawings, words, and gestures.  Thinking is limited by egocentricism and a focus on perceptual states.  It is rigid in relying on appearances rather than underlying realities.

            The concrete-operational period (ages 7-11) marks the stage when children acquire operations, which are systems of internal mental actions that underlie logical thinking.  Because children can conceptualize tangible reality in terms of logical principles, they overcome the limitations of preoperational thought.  For example, they can understand the conservation of volume despite differences in the shape of a container and the concept of taking a different visual perspective on an object.  But, these logical operations can only be applied to concrete objects. 

Thus, following the contours of Piaget’s theory, it might be supposed that the pre-adolescent begins puberty with cognitive skills that would be strained by the social, moral, and academic abstractions that the typical middle school ages child faces as he or she transitions from elementary school.  For example, when a child leaves elementary school she is often faced with the greater social challenge of peers who are more insecure about their changing physical appearance.  She is faced with greater moral challenges of peers engaging in practices which may conflict with the values of her family.  Teachers are often requiring more abstract thinking.  If a child receives a report card with low grades, this might be easily interpreted concretely as a proof of their deficiencies.  It requires more abstract thought to adjust one’s attributions to say, “I am changing, this is my first report card of many and it is not a statement of who I am.”

            The formal-operational period (ages 11-15) marks the stage in which mental operations, previously limited to the concrete, can now be applied to the possible, hypothetical and the future. Cognitive development in this stage allows the acquisition of scientific thinking from inductive generation of hypotheses to highly abstract and deductive reasoning.  Thus, for Piaget, adolescence forms a developmental period in which a child-like cognitive style makes a transition to adult-like thinking.

Flavell’s Amendments to the Developmental Trends Noted by Piaget

            If we were left with Piaget’s stages as discrete, sequential periods, we might be tempted to explain early adolescent depression in terms of the strain of the transition from concrete-operational thinking to formal-operational thinking.  However, more recent research has caused Piaget’s periods to be seen more as fluid trends, rather than rigidly bounded sequential stages.  This is due to two important findings since Piaget’s original research.  First, children’s cognitive performance tends to be uneven across different domains of knowledge. Second, young children are more competent and older children less competent than Piaget allowed for in his stage theory (Flavell, Miller, & Miller, 1993).