Art, drawing, and writing experiences and musical and dramatic activities will enhance their symbolic thinking.

Symbolic play supports language skills, builds executive function, nurtures social-emotional skills, and boosts creativity. Joining your child in their imaginary world is a great way to promote pretend play! Parents can also encourage this through certain toys, like doctor’s kits, play kitchen sets, and costumes.

Symbolic thought is common for children to engage in through the process of pretend or make believe. An example is children playing in the dirt to make food. The children imagine themselves to be other people or animals also using drawing, writing, singing and talking [1].

The concrete operational stage is the third stage in Piaget’s theory of cognitive development. This period spans the time of middle childhood—it begins around age 7 and continues until approximately age 11—and is characterized by the development of logical thought.

Egocentric thinking is the normal tendency for a young child to see everything that happens as it relates to him- or herself. This is not selfishness. For example, if a child wants very much for something to happen, and it does, the child believes he or she caused it to happen.

Perception often results in learning information that is directly relevant to the goals at hand, but sometimes it results in learning that is incidental to one’s immediate goals. Perception becomes more skillful with practice and experience, and perceptual learning can be thought of as the education of attention.

The symbolic function substage is when children are able to understand, represent, remember, and picture objects in their mind without having the object in front of them.

The concrete operational stage is the third stage in Piaget’s theory of cognitive development. The child is now mature enough to use logical thought or operations (i.e. rules) but can only apply logic to physical objects (hence concrete operational).