How Parents Can Facilitate Their Child's Learning Process

When it comes to a child’s learning curve, parents tend to play a significant role in encouraging, fostering and enhancing their child’s abilities, says Richa Shukla, content expert, Sesame Workshop, India

- Richa Shukia

Anubha is one of many mothers who cannot get her son, Arun, to concentrate on one activity. It seems that Arun, keeps hopping from one thing to another, distracted and unfocussed. He gleefully seizes the next thing that comes his way, leaving the activity he was previously engaging in, unfinished. His room is a plethora of incomplete projects, games, books, drawings, etc. Anubha wonders in despair how she can woo her son to complete at least one task. This is a dilemma that is faced by many parents who often struggle to build their child’s attention span.

Parents play a significant role in helping their child develop executive functioning skills that is said to help them concentrate, focus and persist. These include skills of task persistence, problem-solving, conflict resolution, and delayed gratification. It is critical to instill and nurture these skills during a child’s early years as this is when the brain develops rapidly, with 700 to 1,000 new neural connections forming every second.

Here are some simple ways to help your child develop these skills: