Beyond A,B,C: How to Encourage Your Preschooler to Love Learning
There’s no need for a whole roomful of books or expensive learning toys to encourage your child’s love for learning. It’s a matter of creating a habit and turning learning from a chore to a passion.
As parents, you perhaps know by now that there are all sorts of toys and materials peddled around that are said to enhance a child’s smarts or help build your child’s love for learning. There are centers that claim to teach children how to read by age 3, there are toys that teach kids how to count when they’re toddlers. Either way, have you ever stopped and asked yourself: Why am I pressuring myself to turn my child into a genius?
As parents, you want what’s best for your child, and what’s better than pouring your money, time and resources into all these classes and toys is building the best foundation there is for learning: learning how to love the process of learning.
But how do you teach your child to love learning, if you don’t view learning as a positive thing? Most adults equate learning with studying, and studying for most of us means long hours, grueling tests, and stressful homework. It all starts with a change in perspective.
Learn to love learning yourself first.
As the saying goes, “You can’t give what you don’t have.” Encouraging your preschooler to love learning starts with you. Model a “can-do” attitude towards tasks, and resilience when you come across failures. It could be as simple as finishing that 5-minute home exercise routine or laughing when a dish you cooked doesn’t turn out edible and doing better next time. And the next time your child asks you a question you don’t know the answer to, find the answer together—it shows perseverance and a willingness to learn something new.
Be curious together.
Shrugging and saying, “I don’t know” when your preschooler asks you something ends your child’s curiosity over a subject. Rather than letting that happen, find the answer together and explain it in ways that they would understand. Children are very literal, so if it’s possible to connect it to things that they already know or are exposed to, or if there’s a way to answer it using their senses, then they would realize that there are different ways of learning.
Focus on values.
Some complaints of adults about the traditional school system would be that with more than half of what we learn in school aren’t applicable to the real world. While that might be true, what matters isn’t what you learned, it’s the values and good habits that were built because of being in school.
Traits such as hard work, perseverance, creativity, honesty, and resilience are what makes a good learner. Teaching your child to stick with a task from start to finish, finding other materials to create something new, or working hard on a project, will teach your preschooler that learning is far from drudgery—it’s a life skill that they’ll be able to use forever.