As children grow older, they go through a series of developmental stages that are important to all aspects of their personhood including physical, intellectual, emotional and social. They think and learn in new ways. Each child has special interests and needs, and all children are not the same at the same age. The proper role of the parent in childcare and development is to provide encouragement, support and access to child care activities that enable the child to master key developmental skills. Parents can help children build on their natural interests and abilities by sharing activities with them. They can expose a child to age appropriate challenges to encourage development and expose the child to experiences that allows him/her to explore and learn from interacting with their environment.

Children Use The Things Around Them To Learn About The World

Young children do not think about things the same way that older children and adults do. They use concrete, hands-on experiences to help them learn. They selectively attend to aspects of their environment by searching, seeing, remembering, correcting, checking and problem-solving. Parents should realize that their role is not to pour information into their children’s minds, nor is it to leave children to independently discover everything for themselves, but to actively find ways of supporting the learning which is going on all of the time. They can help their children grow by being a part of their experiments and by talking with children about them.

Reggio Emilia Approach

This educational philosophy shows that all children possess strong potentials for self-development, and they learn and grow with their relationships with others. Reggio Emilia Approach shows that best education has to focus on each child in relation with their family, with other children, with teachers, with community, and with the school environment.

A Parent’s Role

Just as scaffolding supports the structure of a building, a parent should provide enough support for their children to explore and learn safely from their environment. Parents are the first teachers of their children; they explore nature, read together, cook together and count together. As the children grow, they learn to organize time and learn to gain knowledge from their surroundings with the support of their parents. Although the scaffolding can be removed when the children mature, parents remain to be their children’s learning models.

All children have potential, curiosity and preparedness; they are interested in relationship, in constructing their own learning and in negotiating with everything the environment brings to them.