When I Was a Child I Thought as a Child

Children, busy exploring and understanding our world, seem for years to have constructed their own world out of pieces of ours. Within the changing limits of their information-processing capacity, they construct models of the world as they experience it. These models are then used to decode, encode, recall, and act. They make childhood a unique, but natural, period. The truth of this has been recognized for eons, captured in the biblical statement “When I was a child, I thought as a child,” in Rousseau's admonitions (1762) to “leave childhood to ripen in your children” and to leave the mind “undisturbed till its faculties have developed,” in Piaget's more than 40 years of work (e.g., Piaget & Inhelder, 1969), and in current child development research (e.g., Kohlberg, 1969a; Shantz, 1975).