Development of thinking

I am Rashmi Purohit, a mother of 2 twin daughters aged 13 years. I have found that my daughters are very naïve in their thoughts. They are not as smart as their other friends who are here. I find that they still accept things as they are, are unable to deduce logically from the data present. This often leads them to being cheated or being disappointed. Does every adolescent have this problem? How does intelligence and thinking develop? How do I help them?

Although thinking is a very abstract concept, it goes through definite developmental stages. A child proceeds from fantasy, fables and fairy tales to concrete issues like machinery and discoveries and then to more abstract issues like politics and religion. Abstract thinking involves thoughts like the meaning of life, injustice in the world, what lies beyond the universe, solving complicated riddles or posers, games like bridge and chess where you plan several moves in advance and figuring out answers to purely hypothetical questions. At around the age of 12, most youngsters begin the final major stage of intellectual development. In this stage thinking becomes quite adultlike; in fact most adult capabilities are thought to be in place by about the age of 16. This does not mean that we learn no new facts or skills after 16; it means that the basic processes we use to think do not change much beyond this age. Here there is the ability to think in terms of abstract concepts that link concrete objects or actions together. For e.g. the purpose of laws – children say it is keeping people from speeding or stealing while adolescents can see broad, abstract purposes, such as keeping us safe and free or helping people live in harmony. Another development is hypothetical thinking. They can still think about the way things are, but they become much more skilled at thinking about things might be if certain changes took place. Such thinking allows adolescents to judge the reasonableness of a purely hypothetical line of reasoning. Hypothetical and abstract thinking make sophisticated deduction and induction possible. Deduction is reasoning from abstract, general principles to specific hypotheses that follow from these principles. Inductive thinking is the complementary process of observing a number of specific events or instances and inferring an abstract, general principle to explain those instances. The two processes can be seen in the adolescent’s reasoning about nature, science, and even social problems. For e.g. you may try to recall from a number of specific observations, some general principles by which people can become attractive to the opposite sex (inductive reasoning); and you may have tried to use those general principles to generate specific hypotheses about how you should behave in order to attract one particular member of the opposite sex (deductive reasoning). The other is interpropositional logic. Here you are able to know whether logical deductions are linked to each other. The next is reflective thinking. It is the process of evaluating or testing your own reasoning. Reflective thinking allows the person to be his or her own critic, to evaluate a process, idea, or solution from the perspective of an outsider and to find errors or weak spots in it. The reflective thinker can then sharpen plans, arguments, or points of view – making them more effective, more powerful. This can help in games of strategy such as chess, or in debates on such social issues as the morality of abortion or the wisdom of a nuclear freeze. Reflective thinking can also make the adolescent a powerful experimenter and a problem solver because it involves the ability to think through a number of possible strategies or experiments and to decide which one will yield the most information.

How you can help?

Rashmi, you may need to expose your children to a lot of puzzles and logic books. You must also facilitate their interaction with academicians – friends who are in the management fields, professors or teachers and who can teach them arguments at the logical level. It may also help if you are able to help them think about things and only then take an action. Action without thought is useless. Next, you may need to expose them to a lot of movies, television programmes and newspapers/magazines which also promote a lot of thinking and arguments. You must also try and take away their minds from simplistic pleasures like food and drink to more complex and abstract pleasures.