Nurture our child’s learning skills and habits can be very challenging to many of us.  We send our child to preschool, child development center, learning enrich center and so on in order to allow our child receive as much knowledge and information as possible at early age.  However, we may find that our child does not enjoy learning.  The child feels reluctant to go to school each day; he has no interest in writing or reading; he doesn’t like to socialize or participate; his behavior changes e.g. sad or angry most of the time etc.  What can we do to nurture our child in learning better and cultivating good learning habits?

What is learning?  Many of us thinks that learning is just about recognizing letters and numbers, reading, writing and counting.  Due to this, we try to search the special teaching technique or learning methods or activities to help our child learn better and achieve good result academically.  That is just part of child’s learning.  To help a child to learn better is also helping the child develop emotionally.

Do take note that shaping a child’s emotional development during the early years is very essential in his ability to learn in future.  Adult plays a very important role in helping the child to learn to cope with his emotional development, e.g. teaching him to understand his emotions and learning to manage and control his emotions.  Experts known this parenting approach as emotion coaching.

The child has to deal with emotions every day.  He needs to deal with his own emotions, e.g. anger, upset, depress, excited, failure, fear etc.  He also needs to deal with emotions from his surrounding e.g. his parents, his siblings, his peers, his teachers etc.  Good emotions motivate the child to learn better.  Bad emotions can depress and suppress the child’s development if he can’t handle properly.  Children are not different than adults.  When we failed in a relationship for instance, we get hurt emotionally and affect our performance in work if we can’t handle our emotion properly.  We lost concentration, lack of motivation and so on.  As we are adults, we have the past experiences to back us up and find other substitutes to divert, therefore we are able to get back to our normal life in short term.   What about a young child?  How will they react if they can express or no one to listen?

Talk with your child

• Ask your child how he feels and give him your full attention when he speaks.
• Listen with empathy.
• Encourage him to to communicate his feelings to you.
• Know how your child’s feeling by observing his body language, his facial expressions and listening to his tone of voice.
• Offer support and understanding when your child is sad, angry or frustrated; celebrate with him when he is happy or excited.
• Provide an alternative to divert his emotions and release his feelings.  You can use story telling or role play by telling a similar story and how the character in the story react when he is in the situation.  I find this way is more effective than telling him what to do directly.

Answer your child’s question

• Be attentive to the child’s questions.
• Don’t get irritated if your child keep asking ‘why’.  You should be happy he love asking questions, because he shows interest in learning and finding out answers.
• Encourage him to search his own answer by referring books.  So, this is also one way to encourage a child who doesn’t like alphabets to learn the language.  I have a boy who doesn’t have interest in phonics or English.  I used story book as a start to create his interest in story telling.  He loves it.  Once day I gave him a book.  He looked at the picture and asked me to tell him the story.   I was busy with another child so I told him that he has to read on his own.  He was disappointed.  Later, I told him that he can read on his own and enjoy the story without relying on others if he learns to read on his own.  From that time onwards, he started to learn phonics and blending of letters because he has a goal setting that he needs to learn so that he can read on his own and enjoy any story!
• If you don’t have the answer, tell him that you will look for it and come back to him.  Keep your promise!
• Find out the answer together.  Create an activity!
• If you have no time to reply him, put your hand on his, tell him that you will talk to him once you have finished your work.  Keep your words!

If your child makes mistakes

• Give him a chance to explain.
• Comfort him by acknowledging his feelings.
• Assure him that it’s alright to feel bad about it.
• Help him to clean up and rectify the mistake together.  You are providing him a solution to the situation.  He learns to handle better in future.  He learns to be responsible to his actions.
• Scolding or punishing will only teach him to be fearful to face the mistake he made.  He will run away from admitting his mistake in future due to his fear of being scolded or punished.

Set limits

• All feelings either bad or good are acceptable, but not all behaviors are acceptable.  For instance, the child is angry at his friend, so he hit him or snatched his favorite toy.
• A child must learn to know there’s always limit on every action, but he can always share with you how he feels.

The emotional bond between you and the child enable him to feel to feel loved, supported, respected and valued.  He is able to adapt in new environment easily.  His learning ability is much better and matured.  He is more confident and develops higher self-esteem.  He is able to participate actively in group by asking questions, expressing himself as well as positive to learn from his mistakes.  He shows fewer behavioral problems as he can response to conflicts better and work on it positively.  Emotion coaching prepare the child to become happy and healthy adult.  He tend to have a more successful live and more friendships.

Therefore, lets us take this approach to nurture our child in order to help him learns better in life!

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