Assimilation in Child Development

Assimilation in child development describes the cognitive development of a child as it grows. The cognitive development centers around mental processes like memory, reason and perception. Assimilation takes into consideration the intellectual abilities of a child in relation to its age as a means of explaining some of the child's behavior.

  1. Assimilation

    • Assimilation is the process whereby a child takes in material from its environment and rearranges it in his mind to form some kind of meaning. Assimilation is a sort of mental catalog, where babies store new information and accompanying associations about their environment in their minds. According to Piaget, children are born into the world with only the cognitive perception related to itself. In its mind, the child is the center of the universe and everything revolves around it. However, as the child begins to experience other external stimuli, it will begin to assimilate new stimuli and make other associations outside of itself.

    Examples of Assimilation

    • An illustration of the assimilation theory is that of a baby accustomed to feeding from a feeding bottle. The baby has made the mental association between the bottle and food. He knows that the bottle contains food and as such, a fussing baby will stop fussing and show signs of excitement or anticipation when it sees the bottle. This information has been assimilated into its mind. The baby also makes other mental associations as a natural process of its development. For instance, the baby makes the mental association that a rattle is not a source of food and stores this information away for future reference.

    Assimilation and Development

    • Piaget was of the opinion that assimilation is related to the development of children into adults with well-rounded mental faculties. He proposed that assimilation helps shape each individual and helps determine the kind of adults they will become as they mature. A child with limited contact with other people during its developmental years might find it difficult to interact socially with other people as an adult. This is in contrast to a child that assimilated all the necessary skills and can make the mental associations needed to know how to behave in such settings.

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