Parents are the child’s first teachers
A positive and supportive environment in the child’s formative years has proven to be extremely beneficial in the cognitive development, development of skills and value system, and thereby helps in education of the child. It is one of the primary roles of parents to ensure that a happy learning environment is provided to a growing child.
The intellectual ability of a child is determined by both heredity and environment. Nature and nurture. Children learn from what they observe and assimilate from their parents more than the external world. While genetic traits cannot be altered, parents can help their children develop sound cognitive structures and functions by providing a stimulating learning environment and a variety of experiences from a young age.
If we go by the Cognitive Development Theory given by the famous French psychologist Jean Piaget, a child’s intellectual development happens in four stages. Parents play a vital role in each of the stages to foster their child’s education and growth:
1. Sensorimotor Stage (birth-2 years): Parents teach the child about features of different objects, like size, form, texture, colour, etc. They build the child’s vocabulary by engaging in meaningful conversations.
2. Preoperational Stage (2–7 years): Here parents encourage imaginary play. Book reading and storytelling also enables the child to become more conscious of human behaviour, life-skills and values.
3.Concrete Operational Stage (7–12 years): Parents encourage child to develop cause-and-effect relationships, problem solving, and social interactions. They participate in collaborative activities with the child like doing scientific experiments at home, discovering the history of a place while on a vacation or by baking a cake along with the child. Here parents foster experiential learning.
4. Formal operational stage (12 years and older): This is the period of ‘Adolescence’. Children engage in more complicated and abstract reasoning. Here parents include the child in conversations and debates on various subjects, concerns, and current events.
The role of parents in the child’s education is unparalleled. Throughout the process of the child’s growth, parents must necessarily motivate, guide, hand-hold, challenge and support the child in goal-setting, understanding his area of interest and developing the necessary skills to achieve the desired outcomes. Parents should also educate the child to accept failures, analyse them, and take corrective actions. Thus life-skill education is that intrinsic part of the education of the child which happens successfully only with the support of parents, the foremost and life-long educators of the child.
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