Watching Donald Trump tweet constantly about every moment of his life is disturbing to adults. Like a teenage boy or girl he seems to constantly need to place himself at center stage. Me. Me Me.
Every minor criticism or inconvenience becomes the topic of a Trump tweet. Like a middle school girl who has to keep tabs on her “boyfriend” and tweets about every real or imagined liaison or slight. Every moment of every day is either an adventure or an insult which must be responded to.
Did you see that Tommy was dancing with Pam? Wait till I tell Margie that Bobbie was holding hands with Billy. Why didn’t Jimmy bring me a soda? Sean likes me more than he likes Jenifer because Barb told me so!
So, I ask myself: Did the American electoral college just put an adolescent into the Oval office? There is a qualification that the POTUS must be at least 35 years old, but that refers only to chronological, not mental age.
I was wrong. Looking up the characteristics of adolescent thinking it becomes clear that Donald Trump does NOT fit the profile.
From the WebMD site discussing adolescents.
“…Early adolescents gradually become more sophisticated in their thinking. Adolescents are also starting to recognize that issues are complex and that information can be interpreted in different ways. They learn flexibility, complex reasoning, inductive and deductive reasoning, sensitivity toward others, and problem solving. The ability to see other points of view sometimes can be unsettling for adolescents who may then question issues that they accepted at face value in the past…”
http://www.webmd.com/children/tc/how-adolescent-thinking-develops-topic-overview
Sophisticated thinking? Nope
Understanding the complexity of issues? Build a wall!
Complex reasoning? I am smarter than the generals.
Questioning issues they have accepted in the past? Obama born in Kenya.
No. Donald Trump, the next president of the USA, does not possess adolescent thinking processes. Not yet, anyway. So, how do we categorize his mental age?
Piaget, Elkind and other child psychologists seem to have a better grasp of Trump’s mental development. Around the age of 6-8 children enter a more sophisticated stage of thinking. The pre-adolescent period lasts until the child achieves the mental abilities outlined in the WebMD site noted above.
According to child psychologists…
“…Although concrete operations liberate the child from preoperational egocentrism, the child nonetheless falls prey to a form of egocentrism all its own In middle childhood, children fail to differentiate the products of their cognition— their convictions and claims about the world—from empirical reality. It is almost as if children believe that their perspective has a certain felt necessity which renders alternative perspectives nonsense or contrary evidence inadmissible. It is not until the emergence of the final stage of cognitive development—formal operations—that this form of egocentrism is surmounted…”
http://www.education.com/reference/article/egocentrism/
Egocentrism?
Denial of empirical reality?
Contrary evidence inadmissible?
So, Donald Trump does not show the typical characteristics of an adolescent boy or girl, as I had previously thought. I was wrong. Donald , instead, shows the cognitive development of a child of 8 years of age. We can only hope that his intellectual development is rapid, although at the chronological age of 70 that is not likely.
So, we can all relax as an eight year brain bounces around a 70 year old skull while tweeting at 3 AM in the White House.
“What a pretty red button. I wonder what that one does?…..
The Old Liberal 