The Ordinary is Extraordinary: How Children Under Three Learn
336
The Ordinary is Extraordinary: How Children Under Three Learn
336eBook
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504036191 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Distribution |
| Publication date: | 04/19/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| File size: | 699 KB |
About the Author
Dr. Leah Wallach, a freelance writer, acquired a doctorate in clinical psychology subsequent to publication of The Ordinary Is Extraordinary. She is currently living and working in England.
Read an Excerpt
The Ordinary is Extraordinary
How Children Under Three Learn
By Amy Laura Dombro, Leah Wallach
Simon and Schuster
Copyright © 2001 Amy Laura Dombro & Leah WallachAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-3619-1
CHAPTER 1
HOW CHILDREN LEARN
Living and Learning
When a child is born she doesn't know she has hands. It's an amazing thing to watch her discover them and learn their use. She begins by aimlessly moving her arms. Her eyes track their motion through the air. She comes to realize that these things which keep sailing by are part of her body. Though she can't move much of herself, she is figuring out where she begins and where she ends. With this fundamental discovery, she has started the process of defining herself, the ongoing task of her emotional life.
Eight to twelve weeks after she is born, the baby will have learned to control her hands well enough to bat and swipe at things. If there is a mobile hanging over her crib, she stares intently at it and tries to hit it. When she succeeds, it moves. She is thrilled: she has had an impact on the world. She keeps practicing, consolidating her new powers.
The baby's fingers, which have remained curled, are opening now, and a new part of her body is becoming available to her: she sucks on her fingers to soothe herself. She practices bringing both hands together over her tummy where they touch and explore each other.
She begins using her new skills to collect more information about the world. She starts reaching for objects and grasping them with both hands. She brings anything within reach to her mouth and examines it with her lips, gums, tongue. She distinguishes objects by texture and taste: the stuffed bear feels soft and gets wet as she sucks; the plastic rattle is hard and cool.
As she acquires more control, the baby begins purposely studying the effect of her actions on objects. One of her favorite experiments is to drop a spoon or cup from her high chair. This game, which seems simple to her parents, is complicated and absorbing for her. Each time she drops her cup on the floor, she is demonstrating her growing and satisfying power over her environment. She is learning that people will respond to her behavior in predictable ways: her mother usually picks the cup up. And the game helps her gather information about the physical world: What happens if you drop a cup of milk? An empty cup? What sound does a metal cup make? A plastic cup? A spoon? A piece of potato?
The child learns to use her hands by herself, practicing on her own while she lies in her playpen or crib, playing with her toys, handling utensils and objects that are part of her daily toilet, feeding, and housekeeping routines. Her parents encourage her manual adventures by making her world safe for her, by praising her, and by surrounding her with interesting things to touch. They help her by paying attention to her work — for example, by noticing when she is learning to extend her arm and offering her a soft cloth toy to reach for instead of placing it next to her.
But the baby is the one who does the work. Her parents can't show her how to focus her eyes. She doesn't need to be urged to practice batting and holding. She doesn't need instruction to learn the difference between herself, her environment, and other people. She was born with the impulse to learn these things in her own way and on her own schedule. She learns them simply by living every day. For infants and toddlers learning and living are the same thing. If they feel secure, treasured, loved, their own energy and curiosity will bring them new understanding and new skills.
Discovering the Ordinary
This book is about the tremendous education you give your child simply by loving her and living with her. Recent child-rearing literature often stresses the importance of "quality time" — time parents dedicate wholly to their children. Many of the books suggest games and exercises and props that parents can use to make "quality time" a structured learning period. Some promise that if they acquire the right "parenting skills," mothers and fathers can give their children a head start at developing intellectual and academic skills like counting and reading.
The hour you set aside just to teach your child is exciting and valuable for both of you, but it is only a small part of the time you spend with her, and it is not the most important part. Most of your time together is inevitably spent on personal and household routines: changing, dressing, and bathing her, cleaning the house, preparing dinner, paying the bills, doing the laundry, reading the paper.
These everyday activities are not just necessities that keep you from serious child rearing; they are the best opportunities for learning you can give your child and the most important time you can spend with her, because her chief task in her first three years is precisely to gain command of the day-to-day life you take for granted.
Ordinary time is "quality time" too.
Everyday activities aren't very interesting to us precisely because we do them every day, over and over. We walk to the bus stop, do the laundry, make coffee, for the most part without paying much attention, our minds elsewhere.
But to a small child, our chores are intriguing performances: fresh, complex, and absorbing. For children, the mundane is new, unclassified territory, and it's magical. They set about exploring every day by collecting, organizing, and reorganizing information about their bodies and their environment, about people and how people behave and communicate with one another.
To learn, they need practice. Routines give them the opportunity to observe the same sights, sounds, smells, and behaviors until they make sense of them; to make the same movements until they can coordinate confidently; to hear and use the same words until they can take possession of them.
Learning by Doing
Children learn to participate in everyday activities by stages. As they become more mature, the same, familiar activities reveal new meanings and offer new challenges. At first, children collect information primarily through their senses. A trip to the post office, for example, is predominantly a sensual experience for a six-month-old. The changes in temperature and light when her mother takes her inside, the sound of voices, the face of a stranger standing in line are what the experience means to her.
Older children learn about the physical world as they learn about their bodies through active play. For an eighteen-month-old interested in how objects and spaces fit together and in what grown-ups do, the post office is a playground. If the line is designated by cords strung between posts, she wants to move the posts or climb under and over the cords or make them swing. She can show her independence by carrying a letter and helping her mother drop it in a slot. The different tones of voice of the people she hears on the line intrigue her, but strangers are strange; she's disturbed if someone reaches out to pat her, and may retreat even from a friendly "Hi."
The two-and-a-half-year-old, fully mobile and determinedly self-reliant, understands the purpose of a trip to the post office. She is learning about the world through language and is interested in rules and regulations. She sees that here people stand in lines the way they do in the supermarket and at the bank. They give money to the person behind the counter. She sees the picture of a stamp and says "stamp." She is delighted when her mother lets her help her lick a stamp and press it on an envelope. She listens carefully when her mother tells her where the letter is going.
At each stage of a child's development, daily chores are a source of different kinds of learning. If you've been reading child-rearing books you may be familiar with categories of learning like sensory development, gross motor skills, fine motor skills, emotional or psychological development, cognitive development, social development, and language acquisition. Dividing learning into these different components makes the complex process of growing up more understandable. Though we won't use the same categories employed by developmental psychologists, we will also analyze children's experience to show the many different kinds of skills, ideas, and feelings involved in even the simplest household task.
Breaking down the learning process into elements shows what children learn, but it doesn't really describe how they learn. Children learn by doing things, and their activities integrate all different kinds of learning at once. When a child is asked if she wants "milk" or "juice," for example, she is not only learning words, she is learning about choices. When a child learns to dress herself, she is learning about how her body is put together, developing fine motor coordination, improving her ability to perceive and match shapes and developing a notion of planning (putting shoes on before socks doesn't work; putting socks on first does). The child is also learning social conventions (you can't go naked even when it's hot, there are occasions when you dress up), about the weather, and about the difference between indoors and outdoors. Whenever a child practices any new skill and perfects it, she is learning persistence, developing confidence, and confirming her sense of independence — that is, she is growing emotionally. Ordinary, everyday activities teach the whole child.
Learning with Your Child
The following chapters take a close and affectionate look at ordinary family life and discuss some of the ways you can make habitual chores more stimulating for your child and more satisfying for you. Growing up is your child's business; she's going to do the work. But you can help, and you don't have to be a perfect parent to do it.
If you're like most parents, you don't always have enough time to give your children all the attention they need, or enough patience to keep everything under control without snapping. You make mistakes. But that's part of everyday life, too. Even when you are tired, angry, discouraged, or confused, you are still teaching your child just by being with her.
By being a little more aware of how much you already help your child, you can help her even more. You can involve her in everyday tasks, and in the ways she finds most interesting and absorbing. You can help her feel proud of her accomplishments and unashamed of her failures. You can let her know that her efforts to explore the world are important to you. You can step back when it is best for her to work things out on her own, and guide her when guidance is what she needs.
The next chapter talks specifically about how you can sharpen your powers of observation to make daily life more enjoyable for both you and your child. It also discusses the importance of family members' making a special effort to show their respect for one another and explains why respect is just as important to children as love.
The remainder of the book follows three individual families as they engage in simple activities like setting the table, walking through the park, and getting dressed. It does not tell you how to turn these activities into educational exercises; some may not even be part of your routine. But reading about these families may make you more observant of your own. Understanding the ways their children experience the small events of ordinary life can help you to see the world through your own child's eyes and to appreciate the extraordinary opportunities to learn that you give her every day.
CHAPTER 2PARENTS AND CHILDREN LEARNING TOGETHER
A newborn baby doesn't seem to do much. She eats. She sleeps a large part of her days, busily: flexing, making fists, making noises, seeming to dream, though it's difficult to imagine what could fill her dreams. Awake, she sometimes stares at a face or listens to a sound with a curious intentness, but often she seems unfocused, disconnected from the world and the people around her. Newborns, even some love-struck parents find, are a bit boring. New parents sometimes feel as though the birth process isn't quite over, as though they're still waiting for the person they brought into the world to emerge.
In a way a parent's job is to wait. You help your baby by giving her love, encouragement, and security — and you watch while she does the work of becoming herself. It's her business, and at birth she's equipped to begin. Though your tiny baby can't even roll over without help, she's not passive: there's tremendous activity going on inside her. From the moment she's born, she's busy making sense of the world: looking for patterns in her sensations, finding them, putting them together, creating herself, the things and people around her, in her own mind. Her world doesn't happen to her. From the beginning it is her world, something she makes for herself, something she experiences aggressively. You can best support your child by paying attention to the small and amazing ways she's learning each minute and by helping her learn her way.
Watching Your Child Think and Feel
You can learn a great deal about how your child is experiencing the world by looking closely at what she does, because children think and feel physically, with their bodies.
When your baby grabs your thumb or pulls at your shirt, she's not just practicing reaching and holding. She's also learning to feel her own hand better, to distinguish the sensations of moving her fingers from the particular sensations she experiences touching different materials. She's thinking in her way about who she is. When she smiles and you smile back, and she works her face like a piece of rubber until she finds her own smile again, she's learning about communication. When she makes and breaks eye contact, she is exploring separation, appearance and disappearance. She continues to think about these things with her whole body later on, when she begins playing peek-a-boo.
When she begins to crawl, your baby uses her new mobility to learn about all the objects she can get her hands on. When she pulls a pail of toys off the shelf, dumps them out, and begins chewing on one, she is learning about relationships like up and down, inside and outside, rough and smooth. Learning to walk frees her hands to investigate objects in new ways. When she drags a stool to the bureau and tries to stand on it to reach something on top, she is thinking about space and size. When she turns on the faucet, flushes the toilet, switches the light switch, she is learning about cause and effect. Her mobility helps her think about herself too; now that she can move through the world on her own, she can get to know herself as someone who is separate and who is always herself wherever she goes. She also begins learning, with her body, about relationships between people. When she goes off exploring into the next room, she is learning about how it feels to be on her own, away from you. When she comes back looking for you, she's had all the independence she wants for the moment — she's feeling alone. Hide-and-seek becomes one of her favorite games.
By the end of the period we're writing about here, children are beginning to speak and to use ideas as adults do, to think and feel about things that aren't physically there. But even thought, speech, and imagination are linked to physical activities for children in the beginning. A child first uses words as a kind of gesture. When she looks at the sparrow on the fence and says "bird," she is using language to point and touch. Physical objects help her build her interior world. The picture of a dog she sees in a storybook at day care helps her imagine her dog at home.
Because your child does things you can see to explore, think, and feel, observing her can help you understand what she is trying to learn and how you can enhance her learning.
Parents naturally observe their child closely to figure out what she wants or needs. You'll probably learn rather quickly, for example, to read the different sounds of restlessness, hunger, pain, discomfort, and indignation in your infant's cries. When you are doing chores with your child around, a part of your mind will always be on alert, ready to sound an alarm when the baby is about to lean backward and fall off the couch or tries to take the cover off an electric outlet. You'll pay attention to your child too because you want to, because you love looking at her. She'll look at you for the same reason. When you watch your infant's face and try to imagine how life must feel to her, you are giving her the chance to look back at you. The human face — and your face above all — engages her intensely. At the same time as you learn to read her cries and respond to her gestures, she'll be learning to make the sounds and gestures that win a response from you. Watching you, responding to you, imitating you are things she needs to do to grow up. She'll observe you at the same time and for the same reason you observe her, because it's part of building a relationship.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Ordinary is Extraordinary by Amy Laura Dombro, Leah Wallach. Copyright © 2001 Amy Laura Dombro & Leah Wallach. Excerpted by permission of Simon and Schuster.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
PART ONE: THE ASTONISHING COMMONPLACE,1. How Children Learn,
2. Parents and Children Learning Together,
3. Three Children, Three Families,
PART TWO: PERSONAL CARE,
4. Getting Dressed,
5. Taking a Bath,
6. Changing Diapers/Toilet Training,
PART THREE: HOUSEHOLD CHORES,
7. Preparing and Eating Dinner,
8. Cleaning the House,
9. Doing the Laundry,
PART FOUR: THE OUTSIDE WORLD,
10. Going to the Supermarket,
11. Visiting Friends,
12. Taking a Walk,
PART FIVE: OTHER ADULTS,
13. Saying Hello and Good-bye,
14. Observing Children and Caregivers,
15. Introducing Your Child to Baby-Sitters,
THE WONDER OF THE ORDINARY,
INDEX,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,