Early Developmental Reasoning in Children

It’s a familiar scenario: a family of five has just begun their dinner when the youngest child – a member of the “Terrible Two's” – swipes his hand across the table and knocks plates of food and glasses of water to the floor. After everyone has gotten over their initial shock, the adults and older children all shout, “No!” in a chorus of anger.

What has the toddler learned? Knock food over = No = Bad. Seriously. That’s his level of cognitive reasoning on the subject, and it doesn’t go any further than that. Next time, he will either remember the consequences of his actions or he won’t, but he isn’t going to have a long, drawn-out inner debate about the issue.

This is fairly common knowledge among parents who see it for themselves every day. They understand the developmental process of young children, and they are aware of the limitations of toddlers. No, they can’t reason. Yes, they understand what ‘no’ means. No, they don’t grasp the difference between right and wrong.

But studies have shown that if you explain things to your children, they will begin to pick up on the ins and outs of behavior much faster, and will probably behave better within just two or three months. This means that when your child does something wrong, you don’t just yell, “No!” and put on an angry face; instead, you explain to your child why what he or she did was wrong.

Take the first scenario as our example. The toddler has knocked dishes and plates to the floor, and is probably laughing giddily, thinking that he has just done something uproariously funny. Instead of yelling, calmly get up from the table, pick up the mess, and talk to your child.

Say, “Danny, its not right to knock things off the table. You just made a mess that Mommy had to clean up, and now dinner’s going to be cold.”

Chances are, little Danny understood about three words of what his mother just told him, but since this is the first step of many, we aren’t woried about immediate results.