The world is not the same for each of us. Moreover, for adults and children, and especially when we observe complex and multifaceted relationships between people and the circumstances of family life. Your children and you do not perceive them in the same way. But are you paying attention to this? Often we simply do not notice or treat with a condescending smile the peculiar statements of children, seeing in them cute nonsense or random combinations of incompatible things. However, behind these statements lies a unique, different, childlike understanding of the world. You can understand a child and the reasons for his behavior only by understanding how he perceives what is happening around him. Children are observant, inquisitive, they care about everything - be it the design of a sewing machine (it is in the mother’s interests to limit such interest of the baby, otherwise she risks one day finding a bunch of disassembled parts instead of a machine), issues of attaching the moon to the sky, the process of childbirth. But not always children, when perceiving the world around them, come to the conclusions that we expect. The reason for this is not only the limited life experience of children, but also the peculiar structure of their thinking. Most of the preschool age (from 2 to 7 years) - a period of intensive personality formation - occurs under the sign of the operational stage, to use the terminology of the famous Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget. In its first half (from 2 to 4 years), the child begins to use and improve speech, thinks in images and generalizes illogically. Problems are often solved not in the mind, but in action. At the next stage (from 4 to 7 years old), the child draws conclusions based on reasons that often make sense only to him alone. That is why it is called the stage of intuitive thought. It is characterized by a number of features that explain the patterns of children's thinking. You yourself can follow Piaget and conduct some experiments with preschool children or six-year-olds. Place two rows of buttons or other identical objects in front of the child. Ask: are the rows of objects equal? Surely the child will say that they are equal. Spread the buttons in one row: Most often, a preschool child answers that there are more buttons in the top row. Children who can count make the same mistake: Here is five and here is five. But there's more to it. And now? Now there is less in the top.... A preschool child makes mistakes. Why? After all, it is obvious that the number of buttons in the rows has not changed, he counted them, why does the child not understand what is happening? Because he does not have the same mental operations as we do, and makes his judgments based only on external impressions, and not on what the phenomenon actually is. In another similar experiment, Piaget gave children eight candies on the first day with the condition that four should be eaten in the morning and four in the afternoon. Another time, he also gave the children eight candies with the condition that seven of them should be eaten in the morning and one in the afternoon. As expected. the children believed that they got more candy on the second day. After all, when they give seven candies, that’s something, but four... A preschool child tends to combine phenomena, not paying attention to the presence or absence of a real connection between them. He does this on the basis of external similarity, the presence of a similar detail, or coincidence in time. He, for example, thinks that two simultaneously occurring events are in a cause-and-effect relationship. Remember the children's game of snail: Clue, snail, stick out your horns, I'll give you candy and pie... Children have no doubt that it is their song that makes the snail crawl out of its house, and not just the snail itself crawls out after a certain period of time. In the same way, a three-year-old child is convinced that it was his crying that forced his mother to return home, and not she herself, having doneshopping at the store, hurried home... Children make conclusions based on individual, sometimes random and even non-existent signs. This feature is clearly visible in the following dialogue: “Dad, is mom older than you?” asks a four-year-old girl. - Why do you think so? - the father was surprised. - Mom scolds me more than you... The child thinks in concrete ideas, and this is especially evident in what we think are bizarre judgments about what the child cannot directly see or feel. And quite a few such abstract concepts are addressed to children, moreover, with the hope of their precise understanding. Mom turns to her four-year-old daughter, who has just managed to fully dress herself for the first time, and also buttoned the top button of her winter coat and tied her shoelaces: How big you have become, daughter! You can do everything yourself! The girl approaches the mirror, looks inquisitively at her reflection and after a short time says displeasedly: In my opinion, I haven’t grown a bit since yesterday... The specificity of children’s thinking is manifested in the perception of such moral categories as good, bad, which children often have Each child has an individual meaning. For example, for one, a good person is one who does not cry, who washes his hands and brushes his teeth before going to bed, for another, he is someone who obeys his mother. The child extends his individual, specific categories to others, which can be seen in the story of a six-year-old boy. Another feature of the child is the centrality of his thinking. Centered thinking is not a moral category and does not mean that the child puts his own interests above others, acts for his own benefit and to the detriment of others. This feature of thinking simply indicates that a child of this age is not able to look at the world from a point of reference other than his own. Like astronomers before Galileo, who believed that all stars revolve around the Earth (geocentrism), the child feels like the center of what is happening and cannot look at himself from the outside. A simple example: ask a five-year-old child where his right hand is and where his left hand is. Surely he knows. But when you stand in front of him and ask, pointing to your right hand, which hand it is, it is very likely that you will hear the wrong answer. The child simply could not look at the situation from your point of view, and this is not surprising. We can observe similar phenomena in the child’s speech. This is how a five-year-old boy tells his mother how he skinned his nose somewhere in the yard: - Well, we first jumped from the roof. Then this guy pushed me and I fell,” the boy says reluctantly. “You fell from the roof?!” Horrible! It’s good that you didn’t crash at all,” my mother says anxiously. - Not really. I fell not from the roof, but on the street. - You said - from the roof! - Mom doesn’t understand. - You’re hiding something...Okay, let’s figure it out. Who really pushed you? The boy does not like his mother’s emerging determination, and he reluctantly answers: I already told you... Pasha. Mom goes into the yard and quickly finds a group of boys the same age as her son. But her desire to find out what happened was not immediately destined to come true: the stories they told confused everything even more, and the main participant Pasha, seeing the victim’s mother, got scared and cried. His whimpering stood out unless I did it on purpose. Fortunately, there was a teenager in the yard, who explained everything clearly to the already completely confused mother: the kids were jumping from the low sheer roof of the barn - wow. Then they got tired of this activity and started playing catch-up. It was then that Pasha, who was running at full speed, caught up with her son and touched his shoulder. This was enough for him to fall nose-first into the ground. When the mother at home reproached the baby for not telling her truthfully - after all, it was like this - the baby looked at her in bewilderment: I told you so! And this is for real