How Young Children Learn

William J. Bennett, book excerpt

Here are some critical points about how little children learn, as well as some reminders about what they need—and don’t need—to be ready for school.

• Children need to be healthy, rested, and well-nourished. They need a balanced diet, abundant exercise, and enough sleep. They need regular medical checkups to keep track of their growth and development. This way, developmental delays can be detected and addressed as soon as possible. They need adults constantly watching out for their safety and well-being. Without these basic ingredients, a child’s education—and much more—is at risk even before he gets to school.

• Children come into the world programmed to imitate. Your child is constantly copying what he sees and hears. He takes careful note of your words, behaviors, attitudes, moods, habits, and priorities. He observes how you treat other people, how you spend your time, how you go about your work and meet your obligations. He watches to see what brings a smile to your face, and what makes you bored or angry. All these things are early and powerful lessons. They shape his own behavior and attitudes, including his attitudes about learning.
  

You are always teaching by example—not simply with your words, but also by your most ordinary actions. Imitation is perhaps the most important way a young child learns. Teaching by example is probably the most important kind of teaching you do.

Sometimes you will fall short, of course. When you do, acknowledge it to your child. Explain that “Daddy said something he shouldn’t,” or “I lost my temper, and that is bad.” Help your child learn from your mistakes by being honest about them.

• Reading to your child is critical. As a parent, you have many important responsibilities in the preschool years. There are many skills, ideas, facts, and lessons to impart. From an academic standpoint, however, reading aloud reigns supreme. “No man has a right to bring up his children without surrounding them with books, if he can afford it,” Horace Mann said. “The love of knowledge comes with reading and grows upon it.” If you want your youngster to become a good student when he gets to school, get him excited about books. Read aloud to your child. If you do nothing else with him, read aloud.

• Too much TV interferes with learning. Television is one of the most destructive influences on education in America. It saps time from other activities—like reading or talking with mom and dad— that are much more beneficial to children. It often exposes youngsters to images they should not see and language they should not hear. Sitting in front of the set all day breeds intellectual lethargy and a couch-potato physique.
  

Establish good habits and firm rules now, in the pre-kindergarten years. Above all, set limits. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no TV at all under the age of two. So do we. An hour a day is more than enough for older preschoolers. Television should not become a constant baby-sitter. Remember, these early years are critical. Do not let the TV set gobble them up.

• Children need practice and routine. Doing things over and over again is necessary and fun for young children. They don’t get bored with repetition nearly as quickly as you do. In fact, they thrive on it. For example, practice is how your child masters his body. That’s why a toddler is so happy picking up pebbles over and over again—he’s actually learning how to make his fingers grasp tiny objects.
  

Routine is important for little children in part because it provides the repetition necessary for learning. It is crucial in developing good habits. A familiar rhythm in daily life gives children a sense of security in a world they see as strange and unpredictable. Without that sense of security, a child may have a hard time learning. ‘When your child wants to play Hide and Seek one more time, or begs to go down to the pond to see the minnows for the third day in a row, remember that small children need to do things over and over again to learn and to feel confident in their learning.

• Children need to ask lots of questions and get your answers. Asking questions is perhaps the most obvious way that children learn. You’ll probably decide it’s the most exhausting, too, when your preschooler starts to ask “why?” from breakfast till bedtime. As tiresome as these ceaseless queries can be, however, it is important to remember that they are vital signs of his eagerness to learn.
  

Children’s first “how” and “why” questions generally appear around age three. They indicate that he has an emerging interest in reasoning. He wants to understand the way things work. If you take the time to answer his questions, his sense of curiosity and desire to explore will be heightened. If you ignore them, or act bothered by all those inquiries, you may make him feel guilty about asking and thereby squelch his urge to learn. (Naturally, parents cannot answer every question kids ask. Boundaries must be set. Sometimes kids need to be told, “Mommy is busy right now—let’s save that question until later.”)

• Little children don’t think like you do. Everyone knows that babies don’t think rationally at all. Once children gain a fair command of language, however, some parents mistakenly assume they can reason like adults. In fact, the power to think logically unfolds much more slowly than the ability to use words. A preschooler’s conversation may sound amazingly precocious, but the thoughts underlying those words are actually quite childlike and illogical. His reasoning is still primitive. Much of his thinking is based on surface appearances, and his conclusions about things he sees are frequently wrong.
  

Teaching very young children therefore calls for a great deal of patience and understanding. Sometimes it requires firmly telling a child “No” and realizing that there is no point in trying to reason with him about it, because he cannot understand your logical explanations!

• Direct experience is critical. Adults have all sorts of abilities we take for granted when facing a new situation. We can rely on past experiences, reason out an answer to a problem, picture a solution in our minds, or grasp new ideas through print. For very young children, though, these mental abilities don’t exist or aren’t fully formed.
  

Preschoolers rely much more heavily on direct experience to gather knowledge. They learn through their bodies—by seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling things that are physically present.

• Trial and error are a big part of learning. A young child’s day is full of mistakes. That’s one of the chief ways he learns, since he’s trying so many things for the first time. Each time he fails, he learns something new.
  

One of your jobs is to show your child the right way to do things. It is also important, however, to give him chances to try on his own, even when you know he’s not going about something the correct way (unless, of course, what he’s doing is unsafe or harmful). As he grows older, urge him to keep trying when things don’t go right the first or second or even third time—because perseverance is the key to a great deal of living and learning.

• Play is the business of childhood. Just as lion cubs romp and play at stalking one another to build the skills they’ll need for survival, childhood play is how human beings ready themselves for the adult world. It’s the way children gather rudimentary knowledge about things such as colors and numbers. It gives practice in a host of skills that adults take for granted—abilities as basic as running or heeding directions.
  

Play encourages exploration. It exercises growing bodies and imaginations. It offers chances to interact with parents and other children, and gives practice using words. Play makes learning fun, and that’s important. When a child gets to school, studying should become a more formal and serious endeavor. In the preschool years, a great deal of learning comes through just having a good time.

• No two children grow exactly in the same way. In any group of preschoolers, even among siblings, there is wide variation in the rates at which individuals develop and learn fundamental lessons. It is possible to say that, on average, children begin to walk alone at about twelve to fourteen months. Yet it’s perfectly normal for a child to start walking at ten months or fifteen months. Likewise, some children are using short sentences by age two, while others use only simple words. As long as your child is in good health and you provide lots of attention, care, and stimulating activities, he should come along just fine.
  

Don’t be too pushy. Some moms and dads become obsessed with the idea of making sure their preschool kids “get ahead.” They buy picture book after picture book. They pull their hair when they hear that little Jane down the street is already reading Green Eggs and Ham by herself, and sit down to the next story time with drill sergeant determination. They purchase lots of expensive “educational” toys, shuffle their kids from activity to activity to make sure they’re always “learning” something, and pay big bucks to enroll their three-year-olds in “schools” where they can hone that academic edge.

If you recognize these signs in yourself, lighten up. You could be on the verge of doing more harm than good. Very young children generally do not thrive under that kind of pressure. We do not say it is wrong to set high expectations for your child. Little children should be engaged, stimulated, and encouraged—but not rushed. Don’t try to hurry your preschooler to become a scholar before he’s had a chance to be a little kid. After all, innocence and youthfulness are treasures that last only so long, and then they’re gone.

Reference - The Educated Child: A Parents Guide from Preschool through Eighth Grade. Free Press (1999)