Child education provides a safe and stimulating environment where children can develop essential skills. This includes social skills like learning to cooperate with others and dealing with frustration or conflict.
Expose your child to different experiences and activities to find out their passions. You can also use questionnaires or help them check out books on a variety of topics from the library to identify their interests.
Socialization
The socialization of children is one of the most important aspects of education. It is a lifelong process that begins with the family and continues through school and the larger world outside the home. Socialization teaches children the values and beliefs of their culture.
Children learn how to interact with others from their parents, siblings, grandparents and extended family members, as well as teachers and friends at school. This interaction teaches them how to communicate, use objects and tools, and understand and express emotions such as happiness, sadness, anger or frustration.
Older socialization perspectives focused on a limited number of parental socialization strategies (modeling, punishment, reward and reasoning). Critics of this approach argue that it ignores the impact of culture and a multitude of child characteristics on parents’ choices and parenting styles. In addition, it fails to account for the way in which harsh parental practices and poor home environments send children on negative trajectories of achievement and antisocial behaviours.
Cognitive Development
A complex interplay of nature and nurture shapes cognitive development. Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget hypothesized that children’s thinking progresses through a series of discrete stages. However, a child’s individual experiences can significantly influence the rate and direction of cognitive development.
For example, even very young infants work to solve problems. They might roll toward an out-of-reach toy or turn their heads to look at a more attractive face. They also engage in social activities that promote cognitive development. For instance, 3-year-olds who play pretend with friends may be able to reason with counterfactual syllogisms that are not posed as imaginary stories (Goswami and Harris 2000).
In fact, researchers have found that kindergartners’ performance on tasks that measure phonemic awareness, such as identifying the component sounds in words or indicating what would remain if a particular sound were removed from a word, is the strongest predictor of reading achievement, even stronger than IQ or socioeconomic status. This demonstrates that cognitive development can be more closely tied to learning than previously believed.
Physical Development
Educators who follow children’s interests and provide learning experiences that are relevant and meaningful to them promote their cognitive and physical development. They use their knowledge of developmental milestones, learning progressions for specific subject areas and pedagogical approaches to design activities that challenge children to master skills beyond their current level of competence. They also recognize that child development and learning advance best when there is a strong link between all domains.
Physical development involves growth and changes in children’s motor skills, which include gross-motor skills (controlling large muscles in the arms or legs) and fine-motor skills (controlling smaller muscles in the fingers and hands). Physical development can be affected by genetics, diet, nutrition, exercise, weight and the environment.
Educators who are aware of the physical and cognitive links between health, well-being, and learning can guide children to develop positive body image, self-discipline, healthy eating and exercise habits and an understanding of the importance of maintaining good health. These skills can help children learn about and understand their world, including the relationships between themselves and others.
Confidence and Self-Esteem
Children with a healthy sense of self-worth are more resilient and willing to take on educational challenges. They are also able to recognize and accept their flaws, which helps them maintain a healthy sense of authenticity.
One way to boost kids’ confidence is to encourage them to try new things and to play imaginative games, like making up stories about their own characters or taking turns acting out stories that they make up. When children express themselves through their imagination, they are building their ability to understand the world and how it works, and this is an important precursor for learning.
It’s important to teach children to be more confident in their abilities, but a child’s level of self-worth should not be tied to achieving academic success. A good way to achieve this balance is to praise children for their effort rather than their achievements, and to help them find a group of friends who will appreciate them regardless of how well they do in school.