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Home › Articles › Development › Bringing the Lessons Home

Bringing the Lessons Home

An Excerpt From Einstein Never Used Flash Cards: How Our Children Really Learn – and Why They Need to Play More and Memorize Less

By Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, Ph.D., and Roberta Michnick Golinkoff, Ph.D., with Diane Eyer, Ph.D.

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(Fireside, 1996) by Sherryll Kraizer.

Make Space for Social Time
Children sometimes just need to hang out with others or to be by themselves. It might seem as if they are doing "nothing," but there's a lot to learn from unscheduled time on their own or with other children. Children need to be able to be spontaneous – to be able to just goof off! Creating play dates for our children helps them diversify their social world and develop additional social tools for dealing with a greater variety of social challenges. And social interactions give you opportunities for discussing emotional situations and others' perspectives. This cannot be obtained on the fly, in the car between activities, but only from real social interaction that you are present to observe and comment on and coach as the occasion arises.

If your child is in childcare or preschool, be sure to build strong connections with your child's caregiver or teacher. You want your child's emotions taken seriously when he is not with you, too, and you want that emotional coaching going on whenever a conflict comes up. If you talk with the caregiver on a daily basis about how your child is doing and ask questions about how he gets along with his peers and how disagreements are handled, you'll have a better sense of whether emotional coaching and mentoring is going on. Get in the habit of building strong ties to the people with whom your child spends time. Just as it makes a difference when children get consistent messages from their parents, it's important that the messages they receive from their childcare providers are consistent as well.


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