The toddler age group is generally seen as one of the more challenging when it comes to parenting. We are prone to disagree. While parents and toddler's alike may struggle at times with the limited communication abilities that come with the age, it turns out that there is one big thing you can do to get your toddler engaged and happy. Put them to work.
Good outcomes, regardless of where they begin, are the result of a lot of work. Outside of starting someone down the path toward examining something, quotes are – in our opinion - useless and frequently harmful. You will never really be able to understand a subject, an event, or especially a human being (including yourself), from a quote.
As a parent you may ask, “How do I help my child with social skills?”. Much like baking, using the phone to set an appointment, sweeping a floor, or getting dressed every day, maneuvering the minefield of complex social structures takes practice. Getting the social practice in requires the same thing as practical life – opportunities to try. And fail. And then try again. It is tempting as a parent to want to shield our child from the challenges and pain that social life brings.
Montessori facilitates an environment where children are free to explore, learn, and grow safely while providing guides to support children along the path. One assumption underlying this approach is that children are owners and active participants in their own lives who are capable of doing things on their own. We would go so far as to say that children begin to really own the choices that drive their lives and that they start growing apart from us from the second they are born. Controversial? Well, no. It is literally true the instant the cord is cut. As parents and educators we become blameworthy for developmental failures when we are accomplices in creating "adult children" rather than adults. This generally happens when we fail to become the guide that helps another human being desire to be in charge of creating their own story (hopefully one that is meaningful and fulfilling). The child that grows into an adult is the child that has had plenty of practice building the skills and traits that differentiate an adult from a 6 foot tall toddler.
Years ago, we came across an article written by a parent at a Houston Montessori school. In the article, the parent describes Montessori as Libertarian with a capital L. If we are being honest, we would tend to say the article "rationalizes" more than describes.
If we are being honest, we gave up on resolutions years ago. Our personal take is that life is a process of continuous development that is guaranteed to end both abruptly, and with many tasks left uncompleted. That is partially a reflection of our stoicism, but it is also an acknowledgement of the reality that life is precious and short. When we consider our wishes we take this fact into account, because if it is short for us it is short for everyone around us. We are not exceptional, special, or entitled to anything more than any of our fellow man – and that includes gaining any more of the precious seconds that tick by on our life clocks. Given this, we continue to press on with a continuously evolving personal to do list on the path to incomplete growth and personal imperfection knowing that there is no way our lists will ever be complete and that what we want today will not necessarily be what is best for us tomorrow. Life is funny that way.
We all belong to different communities. Many of them in fact. Some of these communities we are born into and while we have the choice to abandon them, they tend to be personally defining in a way that makes them worth working on. The obvious one is country, a community where compromise and sacrifice is worthwhile just to ensure the survival of an entity that defines millions in myriad ways (culturally, economically, institutionally). Other communities are ones that we join freely. A local lodge, a club/meetup with people of similar interests, a church, and even a neighborhood where we choose to live are all such communities.
When children begin to name and then recognize triggers for their emotions, good and bad, they are granted a new superpower. That superpower is self-control. Self-control is critical for development and is the basis for emotional maturity in adulthood. To help children on their path to emotional maturity we are launching the emotion project next week. While our high level goal is to get children thinking about the connections between their actions and emotions, we have a series of long-term goals in mind that will probably align quite well with you as parents.
Curiosity has a lot of praise heaped on it. But for all that praise, it is in desperately short supply. We live in a time where minds are made up in social groups about complex issues - often without any sort of expertise or evidence, where accusations made against others in public are accepted pronouncements of guilt without a trial, and where questions we want answered are sent through programs that tell us only what they know we want to hear (even though there are better search engines like DuckDuckGo that don't target us with specific answers). In many ways it has become socially unacceptable to be curious while at the same time praising curiosity as if it is the best thing in the world. Thankfully, children are oblivious to the social pressures that squash our natural curiosity.
This blog isn't only for our parents at the school. This one is for the bosses to whom our parents report. But we are getting ahead of ourselves. At Greystone House we support families with children from 6 weeks old through Kindergarten. We are very fortunate in that many of our families start in our infant room and remain all the way through our programs. Not only is that a great way to provide stability for the children, but it is a wonderful opportunity for us to build a partnership and relationship over time as we get to really know the family. One thing we see over and over again that we love as much as the growth of the children is the development of our Mom's and Dad's. We like being a part of that, and we feel the need to suggest that employers be a part as well.
Starting good eating habits early is critical. There is no other way to put it. Obesity in children aged 2-5 in the United States sits at 13.4%. By the teenage years it has increased to 21.2%. By adulthood it has climbed to 42.4%. And obesity continues to increase. The costs from a healthcare perspective are staggering. As we are all aware, changing habits - whether positive or negative - is hard to do. With this in mind, it is generally better to form good habits early rather than attempting to change them later. At Greystone House, we focus on proper nutrition from the earliest ages.
Fall is (thankfully) approaching and that means the potential for pleasant outdoor time in Texas. Texas offers numerous ways to enjoy the outdoors, some of which we have already covered. If you have children that can walk, stay close to you voluntarily, and respond well to verbal commands, the list of options gets much bigger and starts to include overnight camping. With this in mind, we have put together (another) list of things to do with your children on a free weekend. Holiday weekends not recommended if you are the type that avoids crowds.
Free play is something we have endorsed before,. That is – in part – because it is critical to future happiness, emotional development, creativity, social skills, political savvy, curiosity, and self-control. The science is pretty clear on this. Yet it is rare to see children engaged in free play. On the rare occasions where a cluster of children is spotted it tends to be under the supervision of a group leader at one of any number of structured activities. While those activities may be useful in terms of filling in free time, too many of them are detrimental to child development. The outcomes since the early 1980s where the trend toward extracurricular overload began are sad. Increased anxiety and depression are but two of the negative long-term effects. And because of the length and depth of the trend, we are now in an age where many parents never had the chance to enjoy the benefits of free play.
While cultural ideas and practices change, what does tend to stand the test of time are virtues and the moral development they stem from. The list of Aristotelian virtues is quite long, but there are a few worth calling out to demonstrate the point of them being timeless: courage, proper ambition, truthfulness, wittiness, patience, and friendliness. We would struggle mightily to argue with the possession of any of these traits being a bad thing. It turns out with young children, some of the wiring for these virtues is not in place yet while other virtues seem to present or absence abundance from the earliest ages.
When you live through the torrential rains that are occasionally unleashed on Southeast Texas, the concept of a desert can be hard to grasp. This is of course truer for young children who have never seen a desert landscape in person. While we are used to thinking of deserts as hot - and the areas we went through certainly met that portion of the definition - deserts can also be very cold. What they are boils down to a lack of precipitation - not a temperature range.
We emphasize early science awareness at Greystone House. We are firm believers that early childhood education lacks value if it fails to instill a curiosity about the natural world. One of the ways we instill this is via dedicated curricula that focus on science topics. This week is one of our favorites and the easiest to present and reinforce as it reflects very clearly the place we all live. The curriculum looks at forest and wetland biomes. For many of us an exploration of these biomes is within walking distance of our home. For The Woodlands school location, both biomes are present on the school grounds. While exploration is great in your yard, what follows is a list of places for those who wish to venture out with your children a little farther from home.
While maps, place names, and landmarks are important for young children to learn, geography as a science is far more about how geographic entities and the relationships they have to each other effect the world. Those entities can be real and physical. Examples of a real geographic entity might include a river, a building, a tree, or a road. Other entities can be present on a map, but invisible to the human eye. An entity that is invisible to the human eye could be a border around a city, change in the health of vegetation mapped using infrared imaging, a group of people, or a map of the potential spread of a wildfire or other phenomena.
I feel very fortunate to have the friends I have. I am equally happy to see that my kids are experiencing the benefits that friendship brings. Knowing that they have people beyond family that they can reach out to for anything is a source of comfort and a reflection of interpersonal skills they have managed to build. It turns out that having friends is just as important for preschool children, and in some ways, more beneficial.
At Greystone House, we tend to place a lot of emphasis on the care and maintenance of our bodies. While we believe this to be important whether you are aged 5 or 95, we would argue it is critical for the ages we serve. Like so much of what we do at Greystone House, this emphasis is simply a foundation for building good lifelong habits, and the earlier you start the better the result will be. What follows is a list of some of the ways we build this skill and how you can work on building it at home.
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