Communication and The Best Brain Builders for Children

Last week our early intervention staff got together to discuss how to provide successful home visits for children in our program.  Our goal is to communicate effectively with families and with each other to provide the best services possible.  In order to measure our progress with this goal, parents will be asked to fill out a short survey at the 6-month review and annual review of the Individual Family Service Plan.  Please let us know what we can do better to serve you and your family.

We also talked about the best way to help children learn.  We discussed information from the book "Einstein Never Used Flashcards".  This book states that children are being over-scheduled and expected to participate in academic activities before they are ready in order to "keep up."  This is causing anxiety and excessive depression, which also interferes with performance and learning.  The authors suggest that key predictors of healthy intellectual and emotional development are "responsive, nurturing relationships with parents and caregivers."  Simply hanging out with your children, doing housework, playing, and spending time together (not shuttling them from one activity to another in the car), is what provides the support and learning opportunities necessary for healthy development of social and academic skills.  The authors also suggest that parents adopt the mantra "Reflect, Resist, and Re-center" to help them avoid guilt from not signing there child up for one more activity/club/group.

• Reflect - Ask yourself "Is this experience or activity worth reducing my child's unstructured playtime further, schlepping to and from in the car, and paying for?"  Occasionally the answer will be yes, but not always.
• Resist - Avoid joining the frenzy.  Remember, to be well-adjusted, happy, and smart, children do not need to attend every class and own each educational toy.  If you feel guilty for choosing childhood over "opportunities for accelerated learning" then you need to:
• Re-center - Reassure yourself that you have made a good choice, that you have recognized that the true center of childhood is play, not work.  After all, play is the primary way children were designed to learn.  The best way to re-center is to play with your child.

If you really want to help your children learn, notice the world as they do and seize natural opportunities to help them learn.