d he looked for something to suck on, like a bottle. I could tell he
needed his mother. As soon as I handed him over, he stopped crying and fell right to
sleep. Sean has not yet reached the mutration process. He is still very young and has
just learned how to hold his head up by himself.
When it comes to cognitive development, Jean Piaget believed that it is a way of
adapting to the environment. He believed that children do not have many built in
responses. According to Piaget, babies spend the first two years of life in what is known
as the Sensory Motor stage. This is when infants develop what is called object
permanence; the concept that things continue to exist even when things are out of sight. I
had a chance to play a game of peek-a-boo with Sean during another interaction.
Every time I put my hands over my eyes he would just stare at my hands waiting for me
to reappear. He knew that I would reappear and the longer it took for me to reappear
the more worried he would look. It was almost like he was saying to me,
¡°you need to come back, that is part of the game¡±.
Sean is not yet old enough to understand the concept of object permanence,
but by the time he is eighteen to twenty-four months old, he will be able to ¡°imagine the
movement of an object that they do not actually see move¡± (Morris/Maisto, 401). That
skill depends on the ability to form mental representations. Mental representations are
mental images or symbols, such as words, used to think about or remember an event, a
It will be interesting to see Sean when he reaches the end of the Sensory-
Motor stage and develops self-recognition. Right now if you were to put a spot
of red paint on his nose and hold him up in front of the mirror, he would be so fascinated
by the baby with the red nose in the mirror. When Michael reaches twenty-one to twenty-
four months and a spot of red pai...