Piaget's and Erikson's Theories: Stages of Development

Piaget and Erikson are two of the most influential theorists who developed and worked on stage approach or stage theory on social and moral development. Piaget differs from Erikson because his focus is on the cognitive development in which he identified four major stages of how the intellectual development or the ability of the child to think, develops gradually, as the child grows. Piaget in his stages of cognitive development, was able to detail the ways in how a child's thinking changes month by month and year by year. Although the rate at which different children develop varies, he believed that every child passes through the same predictable stages, for example, infants in the first couple of years of life are capable only of forming simple schemas based on their actual physical encounters with the world and are able to experience the world through their senses and motor actions but as the child grows and experiences new things in the world, schemas become much more complex. . Piaget in his stages of cognitive development, was able to detail these ways of child's thinking and how the child's maturation changes month by month, year by year but the rate at which different children develop varies for example, any 4-year-old child doesn't have the same cognitive development compared to a 7-year-old because older children have higher intellectual development than their younger counterparts and Piaget explained that each stage must builds on the last stage so the child's ability to solve more complex problem also increases stage by stage.

Erikson's theory differs from Piaget's theory in the sense that it covered the entire lifespan rather than childhood and adolescent development. Erikson's eight stages of psychosocial development that had roots in Freudian theory, is a development that is a lifelong process in which he stressed the emotional dynamics of social development and he also recognized the impact of culture and society on human development. Within Erikson's stages, a central crisis presents itself because he believe that all of us face a series of crisis or sensitive periods as we grow from infancy stage to old age stage, as we mature and people expect more from us. And as children or adolescents or adults - we may develop more strongly in one way or another, depending on how other people respond to our efforts to cope with such issue. Each of these crisis or sensitive period in different stages represents an important issue confronting the individual at that point of development that calls for that individual to resolved the issue by choosing to resolve it favorably in weighing the issue and making sure that the positive outweighs the negative so that the crisis will be positively resolved, otherwise, the opposite can happen and the individual will go through life carrying the burden or the negative consequences of outcome of that stage. It is important that the individual