Preoperational thinking gives parents and professionals an idea of how a child is developing and the emerging identities of the child. Preoperational thinking is good for communication. It allows children to use symbols to engage their memories. They also understand objects in space, and they can be able to interpret causality. However, their understanding and interpretation are not always accurate and logical. The same thinking allows children to come up with identities and categorizations where they can note similarities and differences in their features and the people they interact with. They can also develop an understanding of numbers. All these features show that preoperational thinking can help parents and professionals understand the proper development of a child and be able to notice any abnormal behavior and thought patterns that indicate a child could not be normal.
On the other hand, there are disadvantages of just working with preoperational thinking. One of them is that when interpreting egocentrism in a child, a parent can dismiss all points of view expressed by a child and therefore affect the cognition of the child in other matters that rely on the development of his or her egocentric thoughts. Besides, children are influenced by immature aspects of thought namely centration and irreversibility. They cannot understand issues to do with conservation with abstract thoughts. However, only relying on preoperational thinking can cause them to develop the wrong perception and limit brain development. Parents and professionals must ensure that children are coping with changes in their physiology and their abilities to develop the theory of mind and vocabulary. They can then prepare children well for eventualities such as literacy and other cognition and reasoning functions.