In lock down with young children. Why this is actually great.
For a good portion of us, this pandemic means working from home while our children destroy the house, eat countless snacks and watch another episode of the Mikey Mouse Club. We feel guilty about it and maybe we don’t want to admit it to ourselves when we finally hit the pillow.
Let’s face it, we are not kidding anyone, we are not perfect parents, the circumstances are not perfect and in no way or form is 2020 perfect. But isn’t this how life has always been? Modern school is a relatively new concept and for a long time only the rich could benefit from it. Many could not read without a formal education but yet they still learned. Jobs and crafts were taught from father to son and well if your father was a carpenter, good chances you would follow up in his footsteps.
As for our modern world, this is not what we want for our children, since we wish, expect and unfortunately demand that they are successful. We neglect to comprehend that happiness weights more than success and that success comes to an well-balanced individual. I should add that a big part of learning is made by simple observation, and a formal medium isn’t necessary or even to be desired.
Some day care and kindergarten teachers are very skilled in stimulating a child’s brain and his ability to learn. These stimulation is very missed, yet what our young children are missing in our absence is a sense of security. The safety they feel around us gives them the courage to explore the world today and for years to come. Because this security transforms into an secured attachment that proves to be their confidence for mostly all their life. This translates into: “ I feel safe and I do not need to develop coping mechanism for my anxious attachment, I can use all of my brain activity for exploring”.
What about socializing? Being around peers?
All of us are missing our old lives, being around friends, celebrating holidays with family or just being out of the house away from the chaos. Bottom line is that those are extras, we are our children tribes and all they need is us. Little children are wired instinctually to want to be around their parents, because it is natures way of keeping them safe. They genes are telling them that if mom or dad is not around a lion will eat them. Abandonment meant that they would not survive and for a young child being left for 9 hours at day care feels like abandonment. I know this is a hard pill to swallow. Modern life is incredibly difficult and we adapt to it by sending our young children into early education. But at the end of the day the responsibility to educate our children is and it was always ours. We accept any help we can get, but nobody will care as much from our offspring as we do.
More so appreciated philosophies of early education like Montessori and Waldorf encourage learning through everyday activities like cooking, cleaning and gardening. You may be ending up paying a lot of money so your child can assist in backing a pie and plant a tomato. It seams as much as we are evolving as a species we always return to the basic things in life.
Your children are not only watching cartoons, they are watching you! They will learn the most from your actions and not your words. And when you are working with your little one in your lap remember that it is all worth it! There isn’t a more safe or more adequate place for him to be!
