[user104658]

Originally Posted by Ammi

..hmmmmmm…(…I really am so on the drag and need to eat something…)…but to delay the encouragement of free thinking and problem solving thinking etc …to philosophise in thoughts…?..until adolescence would not prepare for their higher school advancement but it would also leave it open for more fixed mindsets …more ‘limited conditioning’ within individual environmental factors and less open to thinking beyond themselves and their world…anyways, ta ta…I think I might faint with food deprivation….

Oh I'm not talking about creative thought/expression/problem solving, but more advanced abstract thinking and subjectivity. Not to have the same thing come up time and time again, but there'd be a very strong basis to assume that pre-adolescents are not capable of grasping a concept like gender, for example, and their understanding of morality WILL tend to be quite black-and-white no matter how much you try to explain the grey areas.

From personal anecdotal experience; there's something quite fascinating occurring in my daughter's age group at the moment that highlights this really. She's 11, in the final year of primary school, but she's well into "teen territory" in terms of physical development and that tends to be the case at that age; some of the kids are still very much pre-adolescent, some are essentially spotty teens... and there is a clear divergence when it comes to social and abstract thinking that occurs along that line. LOTS of clashes between moody opinionated adolescents and "still more childlike" kids who see things as very black and white. Lots of more advanced concepts seem to "click" and (it would appear) it's much more firmly rooted in actual physical development than in age or education.