When Mh was 4 years old (so the family story goes), she watched eagerly as her father made her a slice of toast and put butter and then jam on it for her. but to her dismay, daddy didn’t put enough...

When Mh was 4 years old (so the family story goes), she watched eagerly as her father made her a slice of toast and put butter and then jam on it for her. but to her dismay, daddy didn’t put enough jam on the toast. she complained, ‘the butter’s looking through at me!’ this illustrates two biases in the thinking of a small child: fi rst, the butter is assumed to have humanlike qualities as it looks at her (Piaget termed this animism); second, she saw the world in terms of how it related to her, with the butter specifically looking at her – what Piaget called egocentrism. ask your parents or other family members if they can recall ‘funny’ things you said when you were small. do these ‘funny’ statements reveal the particular way a small child thinks? to see differences in the way children think for yourself, talk to children of different ages and ask them questions, such as why the sun seems to set in the west each evening, or why it sometimes rains. do you fi nd that at different ages children have widely disparate explanations for such phenomena? are animism and egocentrism revealed by the children you speak to?