If you’ve ever read about child development or are interested in the topic, odds are you’ve heard of Jean Piaget. He was a Swiss psychologist known for his research and writings on cognitive development and believed that educating kids was of the utmost importance. As Britannica reported, he was “the first to make a systematic study of the acquisition of understanding in children.” And that’s pretty appropriate, since our quote of the day includes his thoughts on how different—or alike—adults and children are.
Piaget was born on Aug. 9, 1896, in Switzerland. He initially had an interest in zoology; he got a doctorate in the subject, which he studied at university alongside philosophy. However, after college, he got really interested in psychology, even studying under Carl Jung in Zürich. He then studied at Sorbonne University in Paris, starting in 1919, where he became interested in the kinds of mistakes kids would make on reading tests he administered. This led to his lifelong study of cognitive development.
While we understand today that kids have very different ways of thinking than adults do, according to VeryWellMind, that hasn’t always been the case. In fact, people used to think that children were just “mini-adults.” So Piaget’s research really blew open this concept that kids have their own thought processes that are “fundamentally different from adults’.”
As you can imagine, Piaget’s work was significant and influential not just in developmental psychology, but in other fields like sociology, education and more. And today’s quote can be taken many ways, but it really highlights that we are an extension of our childhood selves, even if we don’t think the same way we did back then.
Related: Quote of the Day: Physicist Marie Curie on ‘The Way of Progress’—It Was ‘Neither Swift nor Easy’
Quote of the Day by Jean Piaget
CanvaPro/Parade
“There is an adult in every child and a child in every adult…”
This quote appears in Jean Piaget’s book, The Moral Judgment of the Child, in Chapter 1 titled, “The Rules of the Game.” Specifically, it’s at the end of this chapter, under the eighth section called “Conclusions: Motor Rules and the Two Kinds of Respect.”
Before this quote, Piaget is describing experiments or studies in which they’re trying to see the difference between how children and adults make decisions. And of course, there are huge discrepancies between the two groups, as is his central thesis.
Adults have more life experience, more knowledge and more common sense (their brains are just more developed) and can therefore make more complex choices. And again, as VeryWellMind reported, Piaget ultimately came up with a theory that stated children’s thinking is different from adults.
But, he does still say in this paragraph that adults can still resort to child-like decision-making, especially in situations where extreme conformity is expected.
“In certain circumstances where he experiments in new types of conduct by cooperating with his equals, the child is already an adult. There is an adult in every child and a child in every adult… There exist in the child certain attitudes and beliefs which intellectual development will more and more tend to eliminate: there are others which will acquire more and more importance. The latter are not derived from the former but are partly antagonistic to them.”
Related: Quote of the Day: Painter Vincent van Gogh on Passion and Not Letting ‘The Fire Go Out in One’s Soul’—‘Keep It Burning’
Deeper Meaning of Jean Piaget’s Quote—Personal Development and Your Inner Child
At first, it might seem like this quote contradicts the main point in his theories on human development. However, as he notes right after the quote, he’s not saying that adults and children are the same in their understanding of a situation or in the conclusions they make. He’s simply saying that there are echoes of children—maybe even your inner child—in every adult.
“It is, we may say, simply a question of the proportions in which they are mixed; so long as we remember that every difference of proportion is also a difference of general quality, for the spirit is one and undivided,” he wrote.
He is saying that even though there can be bits and pieces here and there of adult decision-making in kids, it’s not 100% and usually only comes up when they’re with equals (i.e., other kids). And simple—or even uniform—choices might bring out a little more of the kid in you, when it comes to adults.
It’s important to note that the first half—“There is an adult in every child…”—is referring to choices and how understanding develops. So you obviously don’t want to take this at face value or on its own because it might be taken the wrong way without the context. He’s not saying that kids have the capacity to be adults or make adult decisions. But in connection with the second part of the quote, it’s sweet to think about who you were, your inner child and just how everything can be cyclical.
Related: Psychiatrist Alfred Adler on the ‘Meanings We Give to Situations’ and Choosing Our Own Paths
More Quotes from Jean Piaget
- “To understand is to invent.”
- “Children have real understanding only of that which they invent themselves, and each time that we try to teach them something too quickly, we keep them from reinventing it themselves.”
- “If children fail to understand one another, it is because they think they understand one another.”
- “Education, for most people, means trying to lead the child to resemble the typical adult of his society… But for me, education means making creators… You have to make inventors, innovators, not conformists.”
- “The principal goal of education in the schools should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things, not simply repeating what other generations have done.”
- “Intelligence is what you use when you don’t know what to do.”
- “Play is the answer to how anything new comes about.”
Up Next:
Related: Quote of the Day: Helen Keller on the ‘True Test of a Character’—Facing Hard Moments With ‘Determination’