Vygotsky’s Theory of Child Development

Abstract

Vygotsky saw child development as consisting of passing through a series of periods of stable development, namely, infancy, early childhood, pre-school age, (primary) school age and puberty. These periods of stable development are punctuated by periods of crisis: at birth, and at the ages of one, three, seven and 13. Vygotsky named these stages in terms that evidently made sense in the USSR of the 1920s and 1930s, but his periodisation essentially depended on the occurrence of specific structural transformations in the child’s relation to their social environment and correspondingly in their mental life. The timing of these crises is in large measure set by custom and social practice. He claimed that under different social conditions these transformations will still take place, but will happen ‘differently’, and up to a point, at different ages. For example, when referring to the crisis at age seven, Vygotsky notes: