The sobering fact of family law is that to be in the business of orchestrating

Chapter 3
Cognitive Development
49
he/she can perform inductive and deductive operations (Piaget’s “transfor-
mation”) or hypothetical reasoning at a level of verbal abstraction that
would be represented by many consent situations involving treatment
alternatives and risks. Further, emergence of the formal operations stage
allows a child to become sufficiently flexible in thinking (i.e., is less bound
by Piaget’s “centration”) to attend to more than one aspect of a problem
at once—for example, to entertain alternative treatments and risks si-
multaneously.