Cognitive structure stage eight (from about 6 - 10 or 12 years.)

Emotionally differentiated thinking.

As the child's testing of his/her theories becomes more complex the results of that testing starts to produce graduated results. This influences the child's over all thinking, enabling the child to perceive graduation in everything he/she experiences. He/she becomes aware of how happy or sad he/she is in fine graduations. In their book "The First Idea" Greenspan and Shanker explain it like this:

"The ability to engage in emotionally differentiated thinking enables a child to understand the different degrees, or 'relative' influence of different feelings, events and phenomena. For example, often between ages six and ten she is rapidly learning that she can like other kids or be angry with them (and vice versa) to different degrees. In school, she not only looks at multiple reasons for events but can weigh the degree of their influence as well. "I think opinions about slavery were a lot more important than where people lived (the North versus the South) in causing the Civil War.' With peers she can compare feelings in a graduated way: 'I like Sally a lot more than Stephanie because she is much nicer to me when I'm upset.'"

Constructing constructs.

Constructs were envisioned by George Kelly as structures that make up our personal maps of reality. As he described them they were more complex structures than concepts, that are always axes between two polar opposites. Kelly never concerned himself about how such structures might come into existence and avoided the whole area of infant/child development, perhaps because such a structure does not seem to exist for children in stages previous to this one. At this stage, however, it is possible that gray-area thinking leads directly to the construction of constructs. At this stage concepts join with other concepts and are summarily transformed into dichotomous gradients involving the two concepts. Thus one construct might be the axis between beauty and ugliness or heavy and light or light and dark. In such constructs there is no mid point where things are truly gray and yet they are all shades of gray. If something is neither good nor bad it is outside the range of application of the good/bad construct and that construct is not used. Constructs are ways of discriminating between or contrasting something with something else. They are ways of identifying what something is by distinguishing it from what it is not. The existence of constructs as major structures in children's personal maps of reality is typical of this stage of development.

Intelligence.

The graduated world view of this stage of development leads the child to a more exacting and numeric kind of intelligence. Greenspan and Shanker elaborate:

"Intelligence now expands to include a more gray-area understanding of the world. She now not only can look at multiple reasons for an event but can also weigh how much each factor contributed. She can do the same with her own feelings (a little, a medium amount or a lot of anger). Her reflectiveness, therefore, includes a new appreciation of both the world and herself."

Socialization.

This graduation of the world and the influence of those in it fosters being able to negotiate various social hierarchies involving power, dominance, submission, likability and various other social skills. Group culture and peer relationships become more important as caregiver child relationships start to become taken for granted. Greenspan and Shanker Put like this:

"Socially the child is now truly able to negotiate the politics of the playground. She can figure out and participate in multiple hierarchies involving everything from power or dominance and submission to athletic skills, academic abilities, and likability. New ways to solve problems, especially group problems that involve multiple opinions, are now possible because the child can compromise in the 'gray-area.' The ability to operate in social hierarchies and employ gray-area negotiation strategies creates the foundations for participating in the larger social reality of one's community, society, and culture."

"Gray-area thinking enables children to comprehend their roles in a group and deal with increasingly complex social systems ('I'm third best at spelling and fifth best at telling stories') All future complex thinking requires mastery of this stage, whether it involves looking at the relative influence of variables in science and math or understanding one's social group and society."  

The sense of self.

A new kind of self emerges understood in terms of ones status among peers and other social groups. Greenspan and Shanker have quite a bit to say about this new self:

"The sense of self is now expanding to include a sense of being a member of a social group. If there is sufficient security in the family, so that the child can take her 'chicken soup' for granted, she can move out into the social group with full vigor and begin defining herself more and more through her peer relationships and these newly understandable social hierarchies. Her sense of self, therefore, is achieving a new level organization and a truly social self (in comparison to the earlier family-defined self) is emerging. This emerging sense of self in the social group, however, is often initially quite rigid and polarized: 'I'm the worst soccer player (or dancer)!' Increasingly many social groups...are organized around rigid rules and hierarchies rather than reflective processes and institutions."

Consciousness.

Consciousness broadens as relativism in intellectual concepts gradually spreads to social relativism and the child's relative position in the world. Knowledge in the form of theories continues to exude more and more connections even as those connections grow more and more tenuous. This is a difficult time as the more the child gets to know the less sure he/she becomes about everything. Greenspan and Shanker continue:

"Similarly, consciousness is also broadening. The comprehension of social hierarchies and relativistic intellectual concepts leads to new levels of awareness and self-awareness. The child is conscious, not only of herself in the group but also in a relativistic sense of the world. It's not surprising, therefore, that we see greater concern with life and death at this time as the child become aware of the cycles of life. As indicate, children may attempt to handle this broadening of their consciousness by becoming temporarily more rigid and compulsive. However, this is a temporary phase, adaptive in a sense, a way to slow down the progress a bit and so digest the new awareness."

The abandonment of certainty.

During this stage the previously simplistic certainty of the cognitive structure is abandoned because although graduation provides greater accuracy it introduces probability. Certainty has to be replaced by the beginnings of complex probability estimation.