Opinion | Your Kid's Existential Dread Is Normal - The New York Times - 0 views
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my daughter said: “When the pandemic started, I was only 7, and I wasn’t scared. Now I’m 9 and I really understand.”
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I called Sally Beville Hunter, a clinical associate professor of child and family studies at the University of Tennessee, to see if this kind of philosophical musing was typical for a young tween. “There’s a huge cognitive transition happening” around this age, Hunter told me.
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It’s the stage when children develop the capacity for abstract thought, she said. The pioneering developmental psychologist Jean Piaget called this transition the “formal operational stage,” and in his research he found it began around age 11, but Hunter said subsequent research has found that it may begin earlier. “It’s the first time children can consider multiple possibilities and test them against each other,” she said. Which helps explain why my daughter has begun thinking about whether Covid will linger into her college years, a decade from now.
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