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“Can you spell your mommy’s name, too?” Expecting to hear her spell the name Lindsay, Maya said, “Yes. M-O-M!” READ MORE
Early Years
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A friend startled me with this confession: Her 3-year-old son's own experiences in a children's center made her realize that he had actually been bored with her at home. The center offered a variety of activities designed to stimulate and challenge the child's creative, cognitive and physical abilities. Each day when he entered the room, he found a table set with new objects that announced the day's theme. The room itself was designed to meet the needs of the children and decorated with their creations. It was a child-centered environment that took into consideration what a child could and could not do. And home was, well, home. Like many, my friend had run into the challenge of what to do with a child who is no longer content to play with a keychain or to gaze at the mobile wafting in the breeze. As an infant becomes a toddler and a toddler edges into a full-fledged child, parents wonder exactly what to do with them all day. Gone are the twice-a-day, two-hour naps. How else can I keep her entertained, wails my sister as she slides another videotape into the player for her 5-year-old. After all, my sister says, I need some time too. As adults, our days are filled with obligations and responsibilities to family, friends, often careers, education and community as well. We do need our time. But our children need their time and ours. Our youngest children's days are filled by us, by what we choose to give them. Parents can learn from the experts - the early childhood educators who design those sunny bright rooms, those days chock full of satisfying and engrossing activities, days that focus on engagement rather than solely entertainment. It's hard to compete with what amounts to an institutional favorite uncle. Impossible to mimic the activities designed for groups of kids back home in your single family unit, where inflating a trampoline, keeping a pet pig, or playing a piano are unlikely, if impossible, feats. And weary parents like my sister often want to find the one toy or activity that can occupy a child for hours, some kind of ultimate toy, some plastic multi-functioning, battery-operated educational gizmo approved by a reputable children's organization. But there is none. Often the choice is our culture's omnipresent one - television and its cousins, videos and DVDs. But reliance on a single activity, especially one this powerful, isn't healthy. Just ask the experts. A child's attention span is short for many reasons. While some may fall into what appears to be a happy trance induced by a marathon of animated videos, this is not an effective parenting strategy, and can actually decrease their attention span later on. Yes, I know, tired parents want less to do - not more - but by doing more now, early on, by providing more, by following the examples set by childhood educators, we may find our children are more than distracted, more than occupied, more than entertained, they are truly engaged and increasingly autonomous. The defining feature of a quality children's day-care center or preschool is its display of multiple activities, its acknowledgement that children need more than a single activity and want autonomy. Notice how myriad activity centers are arranged throughout the space, which allows for the teacher to guide a child or the child herself to choose what she wishes to do next - from puzzles to trains to storybooks to water table to painting. In the classroom, these activities are always available - not hidden, even when their component parts are put away. This is not impossible to achieve at home, either simply within a child's room or, better yet, throughout the house. Just as we carefully childproofed the house, now is the time to perhaps integrate the child and their needs in new ways. Add a child's bookshelf in the living room. A play stovetop on a low shelf in the kitchen. Your own version of the ever-popular water table in the back yard or patio. How to help a child focus on at-home activities? Studies show that, for many, music increases the ability to concentrate. This is true even for the youngest child. It masks what can otherwise be disruptions and at the same time increases their awareness of rhythms, melody and language. Consider the shape of the child day, week, month - children's centers and preschools do, choosing themes and developing activities that enhance those themes. Why shouldn't parents do the same? This week is numbers. Today is the number 3. Let's see how many groups of three we can find. Yes, more planning, and yes, you might begin to feel like Big Bird on "Sesame Street," but again, there's a payoff for your investment. Planning helps develop a routine on which both you and your child can depend. Often your community helps. Libraries and children's bookstores host free storytimes which, in our household, allows us to have a morning dedicated to books. State and county parks offer docent-led hikes geared to the children, especially during summer and weekends. And every outing offers opportunity for reflection once you return home. Children learn through repetition and reinforcement. Drawing a character from that morning's storybook or acting out the flight of the seagull emphasizes the experience and helps the child process it. But connecting activities, you and your child create a narrative which in turn creates memory, vocabulary and story-telling. Watching our child pretend he is someplace else, watching him transport himself from our living room to the real or make believe lands of the nearby wildlife sanctuary or to the small village of Pete Seeger's "Abiyoyo," he is able, finally, to be two or more places at once, to accommodate his bee-size attention span. And the best part: hearing him, days later, talk about the places he's been, delighting in retelling the story of himself in those places. Stories, songs, real and imaginary. There is the temptation to think of the child and the child's days as problems needing to be solved - the real solution is to recognize that these are no problems at all but part of our charge as parents. Our children's world is not a step-by-step linear movement ending in only the option to rewind. n Lisa Alvarez is an English professor at Irvine Valley College. For Letters: ocfamily.com |
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