Regardless of their age or background, all children deserve access to quality education. However, many barriers hinder kids’ education, including poverty, conflict, geographic isolation, lack of resources and poor health.
Helping them find learning opportunities that resonate with their interests can open up new opportunities for them to learn. This can include extracurricular activities like sports or music lessons as well as non-traditional learning opportunities.
1. Cognitive Development
Cognitive development includes a child’s learning to combine, separate, order, or transform objects and actions in concrete ways. Children also develop more complex thinking processes, such as elementary perspective-taking. In these activities, kids learn how to relate a representation of another person’s perceptual viewpoint to their own.
In recent years cognitive developmental research has made significant progress in developing approaches to characterizing the nature of children’s knowledge. Most significantly, researchers are moving away from pitting structuralism and functionalism against each other.
Developmental theorists are developing new frameworks that force them to consider how collaboration between the child and environment plays a role in cognitive development. For example, they’re investigating how new structures emerge in children’s behavior such as intersections of concrete social categories or understanding conservation of amount of clay.
2. Social Development
Children and youth need social skills to connect with others, understand their own emotions, and interact in a variety of social situations. Having healthy social connections is also a known protective factor for mental health and wellbeing.
Educators can help children develop social skills by teaching them how to take other perspectives, using role-playing and storytelling to help them identify different emotions, and fostering empathy.
UNESCO supports the inclusion of ECCE in countries’ education sector plans, through research and knowledge sharing, advocacy, partnerships, training and capacity building. In times of crisis, the closure of schools and other institutions that provide social protection, nutrition, health, learning and socio-emotional nurturing is a major threat to kids’ ability to learn. Children who don’t go to school are less likely to get jobs and more prone to live in poverty, while their health may suffer.
3. Emotional Development
Children learn to experience, regulate and express a range of emotions. This helps them develop close and satisfying relationships with others, and builds their self-confidence and positive self-belief. They also learn to solve problems with the help of adults who understand their feelings and needs.
Young children gain a growing ability to interpret the emotional states of others, particularly their caregivers, through the use of facial expressions. They also learn the situational determinants of their own emotions, such as sadness and anger.
Research in this area of development combines biological perspectives (including psychobiological growth and neuroendocrine functioning) with social perspectives, such as family influences, perceptual processes, the development of emotion understanding, and the growth of a sense of self-worth and identity. Emotional development is viewed as a uniquely integrative and psychologically constructive feature of psychological growth in childhood.
4. Physical Development
In addition to building strong foundations in cognitive, social and emotional skills, child education enables children to grow physically. The development of gross and fine motor skills is the result of regular physical activity and movement. Fine motor skills refer to the coordination of small muscle groups like fingers and hands, while gross motor skills involve larger body movements such as walking.
The adolescent growth spurt, the period of rapid increase in height that begins during childhood and continues into early adulthood, is an important part of this physical development. The height is a key determinant of lifelong health and fitness and also plays an important role in the prevention of cardiovascular disease and obesity.
5. Language Development
Children’s language development is closely linked to their literacy skills and academic success. It also influences their social and emotional well-being.
Children are born with innate tendencies to communicate and interact with others, long before they say their first words. From early childhood, learning language helps them understand the world around them and makes it easier for them to express themselves.
Researchers have found that the amount of language children hear during their early years is a significant predictor of their later vocabulary size. This supports the theory of Lev Vygotsky that learning is most effective when it is a social process. Children can develop their verbal skills by participating in one-on-one conversations and group interactions with other children. They can also increase their vocabulary by listening to age-appropriate stories and reading books with them.