Parenting for Learning

Parents are a child's first teacher. From the moment a newborn looks into the faces of her mother, father and siblings she is learning about her new world. She continues to learn every time she cries and a parent or sibling responds. She learns when she looks at faces and makes gurgling sounds others respond. As children grow and mature, they continue to learn from their parents and family. They learn values, mores', family myths and more. Parents who stop to think about how they can make routine daily activities and events a learning experience for their child have given them a heads up on learning.

Think about this...how many times do you, as a parent, interact with your child each day? If you really do the calculation thoroughly you will be astonished at the number of opportunities you have to impact your child's learning. If you made a cognitive switch to think about these interactions as learning events, you will be on the road to rethinking how you can make the most of the routine daily interactions you have with your child. The idea is not to become a teacher. The idea is to become a teaching-adept parent who sees the learning opportunity in each interaction. A teaching adept-parent sees how to teach through play and routine activities. They do not set up structured teaching activities as these are often seen as not very fun and learning is about play and fun.

Let's look at an example of a routine daily activity such as eating breakfast. A teaching-adept parent sees breakfast as many, many small learning opportunities for their child and uses breakfast time differently than a parent who is just getting the routine activities of breakfast accomplished. A learning adept-parent of preschool children sees how the colors on the cereal boxes can be named, how they can be matched with objects in the room and how they can be labeled as light or dark or same or different. A teaching-adept parent of older children starts a conversation about the ingredients in the cereal and whether they are good nutrients or less good nutrients. They set up games to play about researching ingredients.

A teaching-adept parent plans ahead and thinks about books they can check out of the library that have families eating breakfast and getting the day started. They use these books to talk about such things as: how the family breakfast they read about is the same or different as their family's breakfast, why the family in the book has breakfast the way they do, what would be a different ending to the story etc.

It is impossible to write a comprehensive list of ways the daily routine of breakfast can be used to help children learn. If you think about it, when you add all of the other activities that occur each day in a normal family, you will be overwhelmed with learning opportunities. Teaching-adept parenting requires ingenuity, planning and a commitment to think about your interactions with children differently.

Related Articles
Newborn Babies Information: The Communication Bridge
Effective Parenting for Literacy Development
How to Find the Genius in Children