Jenny C. Yip, Psy.D., ABPP
Executive Director – Licensed Psychologist (PSY22024)
Dr. Yip is a mother of young twin boys, and is the go-to expert on topics related to pediatric anxiety, OCD, child development, parenting, and living a stress-less life. She regularly appears on television, print, podcasts, and national radio lending over 20 years of professional experience in evidence-based clinical treatments, teaching, and research. She has been featured in various media venues, including NBC’s Today Show, The Doctors, Access Hollywood, Nickelodeon, Dr Drew, Tamron Hall Show, Washington Post, and countless others. Dr. Yip co-hosts the Stress-Less Life Podcast, and is author of “Productive, Successful You: End Procrastination by Making Anxiety Work for You Rather Than Against You”.
Cloris Brown
Director of Operations
Stephanie Wei, B.S
Cognitive Developmental Coach
Our Influencers
Jean Piaget
(August 9, 1896 – September 16, 1980)
Jean Piaget, known for his pioneering work in child development, was the first to establish a blueprint that defined the stages of intellectual development from infancy to adulthood. His theory of cognitive development describes how children’s thinking and approach to understanding their environment progress from one stage to the next, and how best to foster their intellectual maturation through these stages. From countless hours of observation, he established four developmental stages that detail the growing complexity of children’s thinking and cognitive development.
Birth – Age 2 Years
The child makes sense of the environment through movement and sensory experiences. Innate reflexes are dropped as the child’s sensory awareness increases. Exploring with objects and trial-and-error experimenting is the main focus during the second half of this stage. By the end of this period, a child will understand causality of time, space and relationships, imitate complex behaviors, and engage in imaginative play, and master object permanence (knowing that an object exists even when hidden from view).
Age 2 – 7 Years
Children in this stage are egocentric and have difficulty perceiving others’ viewpoints. They believe what they see, hear, feel is what others experience as well. Intuitive problem-solving, symbolic play and manipulation (cutting rectangular pieces of paper to represent money), and language development are key motivations. Thinking is characterized by irreversibility and centration (ice is ice and not water). By the end of this period, a child will begin to grasp classifications and relationships, and conservation (quantity stays the same even when placed in different sized containers).
Age 7 – 11 Years
Children in this stage are no longer egocentric, and are aware that others have points of view that are different from their own. The concept of conservation is mastered, and thinking is characterized by reversibility and decentration (water can be iced or boiled). Thinking becomes concrete and logical, which allows a child the ability to order and organize objects into sequences and hierarchical classes. Grasping abstract ideas remain a challenge.
Age 11 – Adolescence & Adulthood
The main characteristic of this stage is the development of abstract thinking and hypothetical testing. Children become able to think with flexibility, and can consider possible alternatives in complex reasoning. Developing efficient, logical problem-solving skills become the goal.
Harry Wachs
(May 24 1924 – July 26 2016)
Dr. Harry Wachs, an optometrist who established visuo-cognitive therapy to treat children with developmental disorders, was an innovative visionary. From noticing that children with visual problems often struggled in school, he immersed himself in the field of vision therapy and developmental psychology, and traveled to Geneva in 1962 to meet and learn from Swiss psychologist, Jean Piaget. He developed ‘thinking games’ to stimulate children’s intellectual growth according to Piaget’s blueprint of cognitive development and described this approach with Catholic University Psychologist, Hans G. Furth, in their book, “Thinking Goes to School” (1974). Together they started a school for thinking in the early 1970s for primary school-aged children in West Virginia.
Dr. Wachs dispelled his methods to therapists worldwide. He taught at Catholic University and later at George Washington University where he established the Vision and Conceptual Development Center in the early 1980s – a program to help children with reading and learning disorders, and developmental disabilities. In the 1990s, his work expanded to children on the autism spectrum, which resulted in the publication of a second book, “Visual/Spatial Portals to Thinking, Feeling and Movement” co-authored with clinical psychologist, Serena Wieder who is the cofounder of DIR Floortime. His work attracted many people to his center in Washington, DC from all parts of the world, including Joe Gibbs who offered him a position with the Redskins during their Super Bowl years.
These thinking games are the basis for our cognitive developmental program at Little Thinkers Center to enhance cognitive growth, academic achievement, and social skills.