Understanding how developmental experience shapes the bridge from concrete to abstract reasoning - and why this matters for families, education, and professional practice
There's a particular kind of interaction that experienced practitioners learn to recognise. A parent who seems perfectly intelligent, articulate even, yet responds to suggestions about "stepping back" or "seeing the bigger picture" with blank looks or immediate defensiveness. "Try to imagine how your son might be feeling" produces confusion rather than reflection. "What patterns do you notice?" generates descriptions of specific incidents rather than conceptual understanding.
Professionals can interpret this as resistance, defensiveness, or unwillingness to engage. But closer observation reveals something more fundamental: these aren't people refusing to think differently - they're people for whom certain types of thinking remain genuinely inaccessible. The cognitive tools required to "step back", to "see patterns", to "imagine alternatives" haven't fully developed. Not through lack of intelligence, but maybe because the early experiences that build these capacities were absent or constrained.
Consider a concrete example: a mother shouts at her seven-year-old son when he refuses to get ready for school. He withdraws, the morning escalates, everyone ends up distressed.
A concrete understanding of this situation focuses on the immediate, observable sequence: child refused → mother shouted → child withdrew → everyone upset. The concrete solution? "Don't shout" or "Make him listen" or "Get up earlier." Each response addresses the specific incident without connecting it to anything beyond itself.
An abstract understanding steps back to ask different questions: What pattern does this represent? What might the child's refusal mean about his internal state? What does the mother's shouting tell us about her stress, her own childhood, her capacity for regulation? How might this morning interaction connect to evening bedtimes, to parental relationship conflict, to the child's experience at school? The abstract thinker holds multiple possibilities simultaneously, sees this morning as one instance of a broader pattern, and imagines how changes in one area might ripple through the system.
This essay itself demonstrates abstract thinking. It's taking concrete observations - specific parents, specific struggles, specific family patterns - and building a conceptual framework to understand them. It's asking not "what happened?" but "what does this tell us about how thinking develops?" It's looking for patterns across different families, different generations, different contexts. It's working with concepts like "mentalisation" and "cognitive architecture" that have no physical existence but help explain what we observe.
A reader who finds this relatively easy to follow likely operates with well-developed abstract thinking. A reader experiencing frustration, confusion, or wanting more concrete examples of "what actually happened" is encountering a lived experience of what this essay describes.
These developmental pathways appear in unexpected places. Consider two well-known children's films that illustrate the distinction: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Matilda. Charlie lives in extreme material poverty - his family is literally starving in a shack - yet his capacity for imagination, wonder, and abstract thinking flourishes. Grandpa Joe tells stories, engages Charlie's imagination, creates space for "what if" thinking despite having nothing material to offer. Meanwhile, Matilda lives in material comfort but emotional and imaginative deprivation. Her parents have resources but cannot enter her imaginative world, actively discourage her thinking, and provide no relational space for symbolic play or wondering. She develops abstract capacity despite her family, finding it through books (symbolic engagement with absent authors' minds) and eventually through Miss Honey's relationship (Alston, 2012; Spivey, 2020).
The contrast reveals what the research literature demonstrates: abstract thinking emerges from relational and imaginative conditions, not material circumstances. One child has nothing but stories and engagement; another has everything but relational richness. Their cognitive development follows the quality of imaginative and emotional engagement rather than the state of their bank accounts.
Using these films as analytical tools is itself abstract thinking in action: taking fictional narratives and extracting conceptual frameworks, recognising patterns across different stories, connecting imagined situations to research literature. Someone operating primarily in concrete thinking might watch both films and see two separate stories about children. Abstract thinking sees them as variations on a theme, illustrations of developmental principles, evidence for theoretical claims about what children need for cognitive growth.
This raises a significant question: what happens when people grow up in environments where abstract understanding never fully emerges? And how does this shape the intergenerational transmission of difficulty that social services, education, and health professionals encounter but struggle to address?
Worth noting the irony: "concrete thinking" is itself an abstract concept.
Jean Piaget's developmental stages mapped the journey from concrete operational thinking (roughly ages 7-11) to formal operational or abstract reasoning (adolescence onwards) (Piaget, 1952; Inhelder & Piaget, 1958). But subsequent research has revealed this isn't simply an automatic maturation process - it's a bridge that must be actively constructed through specific types of experience, exploration, and relational support (Bjorklund, 2004).
Most crucially for family functioning: abstract thinking underpins mentalisation - the recognition that other people have internal mental states different from one's own, and that these mental states drive behaviour. Without this capacity, relationships remain transactional rather than empathic, reactive rather than reflective. The research literature on attachment and mentalisation, particularly the work of Peter Fonagy and colleagues (Fonagy et al., 2002; Allen et al., 2008), demonstrates how this cognitive-emotional capacity forms the foundation for healthy relationships and emotional regulation.
The essay has already noted it demonstrates abstract thinking. Now it's worth examining more carefully what that actually means - what this abstract analysis requires and why that matters.
This piece is using abstract analysis to understand concrete difficulties. It's taking observable behaviours - a parent who can't "step back," a child whose play lacks imagination, a family stuck in repetitive patterns - and building an explanatory framework that exists entirely in the realm of concepts and theory.
The essay requires readers to:
This is abstract thinking in action. Someone with primarily concrete thinking might read this and think "Just tell me what to do about the shouting." Someone with abstract thinking reads this and thinks "Ah, this explains patterns I've noticed but couldn't articulate."
Neither response is superior - they're different. But recognising the difference helps explain why some information lands easily while other information feels frustratingly vague or disconnected from "real life." What feels vague and disconnected to concrete thinking is the very stuff abstract thinking works with: patterns, possibilities, invisible internal states, conceptual frameworks.
The implications are significant: if this essay requires abstract thinking to understand, then the people whose struggles it describes may be precisely the people who find it hardest to engage with. Information about abstract thinking requires abstract thinking to fully grasp. This isn't a failure of the essay or the reader - it's a demonstration of the very constraint being described.
Even single word choices reveal the concrete/abstract distinction. This essay describes professionals who 'encounter' intergenerational difficulty. Encountering is concrete - immediate, experiential, happening in the relational moment. But encountering alone isn't enough. A professional can be fully present in a difficult interaction without being able to observe what's happening - to step back, recognise patterns, see connections. Observing requires abstract thinking: stepping outside the immediate experience to reflect on it.
The professional who can only encounter is immersed without perspective. The professional who can only observe is detached without connection. Effective practice requires both: being present in the concrete encounter while simultaneously maintaining abstract observation of it. The literature on reflective practice emphasises this dual awareness as central to professional competence (Schön, 1983; Ruch, 2002).
This has implications for how clients experience professionals - a slight tangent from the essay's main thread but worth noting. A client might feel better about a professional who primarily encounters, experiencing their real presence and connection. The client might experience a professional who primarily observes as detached and cold - there but not truly present. Yet paradoxically, the client might have more to gain from the observing professional's capacity to see patterns and connections beyond the immediate moment. The professional who can do both - be genuinely present in the encounter while maintaining observational perspective - offers both relationship and insight. Catching these subtle implications, stepping back to examine what language assumes about cognitive positioning - this is abstract thinking operating in real time.
What many developmental models underemphasise is where the bridge from concrete to abstract thinking actually gets built: through play. Not structured activities with predetermined learning outcomes, but genuine imaginative, symbolic play where a stick becomes a sword, a box becomes a castle, and a child negotiates an entire world that exists only in shared imagination (Vygotsky, 1978; Lillard et al., 2013).
When young children engage in pretend play, they're performing profound cognitive work. They're learning to hold multiple representations simultaneously - this box is both a box and a castle. They're experimenting with "what if" thinking. They're practising perspective-taking as they adopt different roles. They're developing the capacity to work with symbols and abstractions that will later enable them to think about thinking itself (Harris, 2000; Weisberg, 2015).
Research on cognitive development consistently identifies particular conditions that support this emergence (Nicolopoulou, 2010; Bergen, 2013):
When these conditions are absent - when play is constrained by parental anxiety, directed by adult agendas, or simply unavailable due to chaos, neglect, or the demands of survival - the cognitive scaffolding for abstract thinking struggles to develop. The child's thinking may remain more rooted in the concrete than their potential intelligence would suggest.
The conditions matter more than the material context. Return to Charlie Bucket and Matilda Wormwood: Charlie's family has no toys, no resources, no physical space for elaborate play. What they have is Grandpa Joe's engagement - his willingness to enter Charlie's imagination, to wonder aloud, to tell stories that invite symbolic thinking and perspective-taking. The play happens in conversation, in shared dreaming, in the imaginative space created between them. The box-as-castle doesn't require an actual box when someone will co-create the castle in dialogue.
Matilda has toys, space, material resources for play. What she lacks is anyone willing to enter that play with her. Her parents can't or won't engage her imagination, can't hold space for wondering, can't step into symbolic thinking alongside her. She finds abstract thinking through books - which are essentially invitations to enter someone else's mind, to imagine perspectives and possibilities that exist only in symbol and language. When she eventually connects with Miss Honey, she finds what her parents couldn't provide: someone who can enter imaginative space with her, reflect on mental states, wonder about possibilities.
Both children demonstrate that the training ground for abstraction isn't material or spatial - it's relational. The question isn't "does the child have toys?" but "does the child have someone who can engage their imagination without directing it, who can wonder alongside them, who can hold space for the symbolic and the possible?"
A significant bind emerges in intergenerational patterns: parents who themselves struggle with abstract thinking often struggle to provide the conditions for their children to develop it. Someone who has never learned to imagine freely, to play with possibility, to hold multiple perspectives, faces genuine difficulty modelling this for their children.
Observational research in family systems reveals play patterns that feel stilted, rule-bound, concrete. Parents might purchase toys but struggle to enter their child's imaginative world. They might interrupt play with corrections ("That's not how you use that") or redirect it toward "proper" activities. They might become anxious when play moves into emotional or fantastical territory, pulling the child back to the literal and safe.
This isn't malicious or even conscious. These parents are operating at the edge of their own cognitive territory. They're parenting from within the same constrained imaginative landscape they inhabited as children. The neuroscience of stress and early adversity helps explain why: chronic activation of threat systems during development literally shapes brain architecture, prioritising immediate survival processing over the more energy-expensive neural networks that support abstract reasoning and long-term planning (Shonkoff et al., 2012; McLaughlin et al., 2014).
The pattern perpetuates: limited early play and exploration → constrained development of abstract thinking → difficulty supporting imaginative play in the next generation → another child whose thinking remains more concrete than their potential would allow.
Yet the pattern isn't inevitable. Matilda Wormwood finds abstract thinking despite her parents' constraint, discovering alternative routes through books and eventually through a surrogate attachment figure who can provide what her biological family cannot. Charlie Bucket receives what he needs from extended family when parents might be too depleted by survival to provide it. The research literature on resilience confirms what these fictional examples illustrate: patterns can be interrupted when children encounter alternative sources of imaginative engagement, reflective relationship, and permission to wonder (Masten, 2001; Rutter, 2012).
This doesn't make the intergenerational transmission less real - most children don't encounter their Miss Honey or their Grandpa Joe. But it reveals that the constraint isn't located in genetics or individual pathology but in the relational and imaginative environment. When that environment shifts, even in the presence of ongoing adversity, development can follow a different trajectory.
By the time people reach adulthood, the effects of limited abstract thinking are woven seamlessly into their daily functioning. Research and clinical observation identify several characteristic presentations:
This connects directly to attachment research and the concept of mentalisation. Fonagy's work demonstrates that mentalisation - the capacity to imagine mental states in self and others - depends on recognising that behaviour is driven by beliefs, feelings, intentions, and desires that might differ from surface appearances (Fonagy & Target, 1997; Bateman & Fonagy, 2012). When abstract thinking is limited, so is mentalisation. People respond to what others do rather than imagining what they might be thinking or feeling beneath their actions.
Standard psychological and therapeutic approaches implicitly assume abstract thinking capacity. Assessment processes ask people to:
When abstract thinking is constrained, these assessment methods don't reveal what they purport to measure. They measure abstract thinking capacity itself, creating the appearance of resistance, lack of insight, or unwillingness to engage when the actual barrier is cognitive rather than motivational.
This creates a particular problem in child protection and family support contexts. Many risk assessment frameworks and evidence-based interventions were developed and tested on populations with relatively intact abstract thinking abilities. When applied to families where abstract thinking is constrained, these frameworks may systematically misidentify the nature of difficulty, leading to interventions that miss the mark entirely.
The research literature does offer one crucial finding: abstract thinking isn't entirely fixed. Cognitive capacities can develop later in life when particular conditions emerge. Adults can learn to imagine, to hypothesise, to hold multiple perspectives - but the developmental trajectory looks different from the childhood emergence of these capacities (Zelazo et al., 2003).
Neuroscience research on brain plasticity demonstrates that the adult brain retains considerable capacity for forming new neural pathways, particularly in contexts of safety, relationship, and repeated practice (Davidson & McEwen, 2012; Kolb et al., 2013). But this development requires conditions that mirror, at least partially, the early experiences that typically support abstract thinking: safety, patience, permission to experiment, and relational support that neither directs nor abandons.
What this suggests is that the intergenerational pattern isn't deterministic. It can be interrupted - but the interruption requires recognition of what's actually constrained and the creation of conditions that support new development rather than simply assuming capacity that isn't yet present.
Recognising when abstract thinking is constrained changes how family difficulty gets understood. It shifts focus from questions of motivation ("Why won't they engage?") toward questions of development ("What cognitive capacities are present, and how were they shaped?"). It reveals that many parenting struggles aren't primarily about knowledge, motivation, or even insight but about fundamental differences in how people process information and imagine possibility.
The research on adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) and toxic stress provides a framework for understanding how early adversity shapes cognitive development (Felitti et al., 1998; Shonkoff et al., 2012). Chronic stress during sensitive periods of brain development doesn't just create emotional dysregulation - it shapes the very architecture of thinking, prioritising concrete, immediate processing over the more energy-expensive operations of abstraction, planning, and mental state reasoning.
This reframes what might appear as "resistance to change" or "lack of insight" as something more accurately described as cognitive constraint shaped by developmental experience. It's not that people won't think differently - it's that the neural infrastructure for certain types of thinking developed differently, constrained by the conditions of their early years.
Professionals reading this essay may have noticed something: the characteristics described - literal thinking, difficulty with metaphor, struggles with perspective-taking and mentalisation, challenges with planning and generalisation, preference for concrete over abstract - overlap significantly with presentations associated with autism spectrum conditions (Baron-Cohen et al., 2000; Happé, 1994).
The overlap is real and substantial. Both autism and developmentally constrained abstract thinking can produce strikingly similar observable patterns. Both involve difficulties with theory of mind (Frith & Happé, 1994), metaphorical language, and stepping back from immediate experience to consider broader patterns or alternative perspectives.
But etiology matters. Autism represents neurodevelopmental difference - a distinct neurological architecture present from early development (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Developmentally constrained abstract thinking, as described in this essay, emerges from relational and environmental conditions: limited play, chronic stress, absent modeling of imaginative engagement, intergenerational transmission of concrete processing.
Sometimes what appears to be autism spectrum presentation is concrete thinking shaped by developmental experience. Sometimes, as Freud reputedly said, a cigar is just a cigar.
This creates genuine diagnostic complexity. The question isn't whether to "rule out" one or the other but to recognise that:
The research literature on differential diagnosis in developmental presentations emphasises careful attention to developmental history, family patterns, quality of early relationships, and response to different environmental conditions (Rutter, 2011). The key question isn't "is this autism or is this concrete thinking from experience?" but rather "what combination of factors - neurological, relational, environmental - contributes to this person's cognitive and social presentation?"
This essay focuses on one pathway to concrete thinking: developmental constraint from limited imaginative engagement and adverse early experience. That focus shouldn't obscure the reality that similar presentations emerge from other pathways, including neurodevelopmental difference. The value lies in recognising concrete thinking as a meaningful pattern requiring understanding - whatever its origins - rather than dismissing it as resistance, lack of insight, or unwillingness to engage.
Professionals encountering families where concrete thinking predominates might consider: What's the developmental history of play and imagination? What were the relational conditions in childhood? Are there broader family patterns suggesting intergenerational transmission? How does the person respond to opportunities for imaginative engagement? The answers inform understanding without requiring definitive diagnostic categorisation.
Information about how abstract thinking develops, how its constraint manifests, and how it shapes family functioning doesn't inherently prescribe what anyone should do about it. Different readers - parents, practitioners, policymakers, educators - will draw different implications from the same information based on their roles, contexts, and existing knowledge.
Take education as one domain where these differences play out. The same school, the same child, the same educational opportunity - yet fundamentally different relationships depending on cognitive territory.
What this information does offer is a different lens for making sense of patterns that otherwise appear mysterious or frustrating. Why do some families struggle to imagine different futures? Why doesn't "insight" translate into change? Why do certain interventions fail to land despite apparent engagement? Why does aspirational language about education leave some families cold while energizing others?
Understanding the developmental pathway of abstract thinking and its constraint provides a framework that explains these observations without pathologising the people involved. It situates difficulty not in character, motivation, or inherent limitation but in developmental experience and the cognitive architecture that experience creates.
From that understanding, different professionals and parents will generate their own approaches, adapted to their specific contexts and relationships. The information serves as a springboard for thinking rather than a prescription for action.
Concrete thinking has considerable strengths: practical problem-solving, attention to immediate reality, responding effectively to present demands. Abstract thinking offers different strengths: pattern recognition, future planning, perspective-taking, symbolic communication. Each also has constraints: concrete thinking struggles with planning and generalisation; abstract thinking can lose touch with immediate reality and become paralysed by possibilities.
Neither territory is inherently superior. They're different ways of navigating existence, shaped by developmental experience, neurology, and context. Modern Western systems - education, therapy, policy - privilege abstract thinking, creating genuine difficulty for those whose cognitive territory is primarily concrete.
As this essay demonstrates, general culture relies heavily on abstract communication - metaphor, symbolism, temporal bridging, hypothetical reasoning, pattern recognition across contexts. This privileging means some people receive the message clearly while others find themselves outside it, not through lack of intelligence or effort but because the communication assumes cognitive territory they don't inhabit.
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Topics: #AbstractThinking #ConcreteThinking #CognitiveDevelopment #Mentalisation #PlayAndDevelopment #EducationalEngagement #ProfessionalPractice #ChildDevelopment #IntergenerationalPatterns #AttachmentTheory #AutismDifferentialDiagnosis #FutureOrientation
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