Education improves children’s cognitive development, social skills, and emotional growth. It also enhances their earning potential and promotes global awareness. It is a key to reducing poverty, as educated individuals can access employment and drive economic growth.
Working with children requires compassion, patience, and an admirable level of energy. This career path also requires creativity and the ability to create engaging classroom environments.
Self-esteem
Self-esteem is an important construct, as it affects children’s participation and engagement in activities, their sense of wellbeing, and their relationships with others. It is also linked to academic achievement and social adjustment (Bleidorn, Hufer, Kandler, Hopwood & Riemann, 2018).
It is possible to enhance children’s self-esteem by giving them balanced feedback. This includes praising them for trying, not for being the biggest or fastest or best, and encouraging them to participate in challenges they can’t master straight away.
In addition, the results of the CLPM and RICLPM indicate that family environment variables are associated with children’s self-esteem in both direct and indirect ways. The indirect effects were mediated by parental warmth and monitoring, economic hardship, and the presence of a father. The inverse associations were mediated by maternal depression and child self-esteem. Moreover, the self-esteem of children predicted positive family values in their mother and father. This was consistent with the hypothesis that secure attachment is related to positive self-evaluations.
Social skills
Social skills are the foundation of healthy relationships, which are critical for children to learn and grow. These include active listening, understanding social cues and demonstrating empathy for others. Children with social skills are more likely to achieve success in school and in life as well as exhibit good mental health.
Teachers and parents can help their children build these important skills by fostering interactions with peers. For example, childcare and kindergarten provide children with their first ongoing experiences interacting with other kids outside of their family.
Adults can also help kids develop social skills by modeling behavior. For example, use polite language in public service settings and at friends’ houses, and emphasize the importance of apologies when mistakes are made. Children need to know that apologizing is a normal part of life and demonstrates self-respect as well as the respect for others. Children with social skill deficits may display behavioral problems such as tantrums and aggression.
Cooperation
Cooperation is the ability to work with others to achieve a common goal. It can take many forms, from a single child helping their playmate reach the top of a tower to an entire class working together on a project. It’s important for kids to learn this skill early in life, as it can help them be more successful in school and other endeavors.
Children often develop cooperation through social learning, observing and imitating the actions of their parents and teachers. By teaching your little ones the importance of sharing and cooperating, you can set them on a path to be empathetic, well-rounded individuals who enjoy helping others.
Past research suggests that cooperation and competition may elicit psychological orientations that influence children’s in-group bias and prosocial behaviour. A cooperative orientation reduces in-group bias and promotes general prosocial behaviour, whereas a competitive orientation increases in-group bias and decreases prosocial behaviour. The latter two effects are expected to be modulated by context, as participation in a cooperative versus a competitive game increased preschoolers’ prosocial behaviour toward their previous interaction partners even when the participants were involved in unrelated games.
Independence
The ability to make decisions independently of adults is a key component of children’s education. It promotes their health and well-being, reduces poverty, and contributes to innovation and societal progress. Education can also help them develop the skills they need to advocate for their rights and be a leader in their community.
Independence is also about empowering kids to ask questions about their environment and how it works. It’s important to encourage their curiosity and provide them with resources to find answers, such as books, games, and nature walks. It’s also important to let them make mistakes, as this teaches them to be resilient and helps them learn from their mistakes.
The information obtained from evaluating children’s learning process allows teachers to construct and organize spaces that enable kids to express their potential and satisfy their desire for independence. This includes identifying children as co-constructors of meaning in projects carried out in classrooms and supporting their autonomy (Rinaldi 2006). The pedagogical documentation in Reggio Emilia centres is one example of this approach.