How Do Parents Teach
The idea that parents are teachers may seem strange to you. Even if you are a credentialed teacher, you may not have thought about yourself as a teacher when it comes to parenting. Our society has segregated teaching to the educational system. Probably because parents are very busy. In this blog I’m not talking about teaching academic skills. I’m talking about the teaching that occurs within the course of a parent raising a child. Often these moments are brief and involve small but essential skills. Although they may be brief, they occur often. These moments are never planned and that is the value of them. Teaching a skill is an important part of parenting. Parents who involve themselves with their children in these small and random moments of sharing their skills with their children have children who do better in life. These children enter the educational system with more life skills than their peers who have not experienced these educational moments with their parents. It’s obvious that they would.
This blog will share one teaching technique with an examples of its use in your daily life as a parent. Teaching as a parent is not a task that is added on to your daily routine. It is embedded into your daily life with your child and uses your normal interactions with your child. You very likely are already doing these techniques; however, you probably are not doing them systematically. Systematic use of a technique is what makes it a technique. Otherwise, you are just showing your child how to do something. Systematic use is everything, because that is how learning works. In this blog we will cover modeling. Modeling achieves objectives in your child’s learning.
Modeling Skills For Your Child
Modeling is the procedure used when we show someone else how to do something. That sounds simple, but there is more to modeling than that. You want to model systematically for your child and in a way that your child will be receptive to your models. Modeling provides information about a task to your child. You don’t want to provide your child more information than she can manage. Thus, it matters how old your child is and what the task is. For a child below 6 years of age, you will want to provide one step at a time. You probably don’t want to demonstrate more than 3 steps at a time for anyone.
Although modeling is the process of showing someone how to do a task, you want to use speech to name the critical parts of the task. Not everyone looks at the same things when viewing a demonstration. Every task involves objects and actions that are central to the task. Every task also contains objects and actions that are not as important to its performance. You want everyone viewing your demonstration to view the important parts of the task. This is especially true for young children below 6 years of age. Due to their level of development, their attention tends to be captured by the sensory aspects of a task. For example, if you are demonstrating hand washing to a 5 year-old child, that child’s attention will easily be captured by the soapy characteristics of the hand soap. The child may also get too involved with operating the soap dispenser. You will use your speech to cue such a child’s attention to the important aspects of the task.
Thus, the first thing is to observe your child attempting the task. Notice which parts of the task the child does well and on which parts he needs help. Are there steps of the task that are missing in your child’s performance. You will want to begin helping your child on the parts that are missing in her performance. However, she may have all the parts of the task. Then, begin helping her on those parts of the task on which her performance is the least proficient.
After you have decided upon which step of the task you will provide a model for your child, then direct your child’s attention to that step. It will be obvious which step your child needs help on when you observe her perform the task. Direct your child to watch you. It is important that your child is attending to the correct things and actions. As you perform the task step, name the action you are performing and the objects on which you are performing the action. Then stop and ask your child to do what you just did.
Your child is learning to do the step you just showed him; this is probably his first attempt to do it, so don’t expect perfect performance. As your child attempts to execute your model, name the objects and actions as they occur in his performance. If your child is in early stages of language development, this naming of actions and objects will provide language instruction. As she acquires the motor steps of the task, she will learn some vocabulary words. If your child cannot execute the steps, provide some assistance while naming the actions and objects involved. Then move on to the other steps of the task, letting your child do those independently that she can and providing assistance with those she can’t. Focus on one step of the task at a time for your modeling. If your child is older than 6 years of age, you may be able to focus on more than one step if assistance is needed in more than one.
At this point, you want your child to merely perform all the steps of the task. You are not concerned with how well he performs them. Once your child has acquired all the steps of the task, then you will focus on how well she performs the task. At this time, take the task steps your child can’t perform independently and provide a model for each, one task step at a time. Move on to the next step in which he needs help. Your instruction using modeling will take not more than about 30 seconds, maybe less. You want to try to maintain the flow of the task routine. Flow of the task routine is important for your child’s learning this skill. Every task has a flow. Some tasks are performed fast, others slow. Your child will learn the task over multiple settings of the task. This is called distributed learning. Distributed learning is the way very young children learn.
Daily Living Example
Above, we used hand washing to explain the modeling technique. Let’s use picking up toys after play to demonstrate modeling. In teaching this daily living task, parents often focus on motivating their child rather than teaching the skill. I think parents assume the skill is too obvious to need explaining or reinforcing. Parents generally nag children until the toys are picked up. Nagging is an ineffective way to establish the habit of picking up toys after play. Essentially, you want to teach children that picking up toys is part of playing, just like getting toys out is part of playing. You teach this by two steps: 1) strengthening the act of picking up toys; 2) reinforcing the completion of toys picked up.
In the first step of your teaching, strengthening the act of picking up toys establishes these behaviors in your child’s repertoire. It also establishes a habit for your child. Habits are an important part of most skills and are generally neglected in the instruction on the skill. It’s not enough to know how to do something, one must have the habit of doing it when it is needed. If your child is less than 3 years of age, then you will need to strengthen the actions of picking up the toys. The best way to motivate a young child to pick up the toys is to do it with her. Doing something with another person is always motivational and it reduces the task for any one person. As your child gets more proficient at picking up toys, you will pick up less and less until your child is picking up all the toys. Of course, praise your child when all the toys are put away.
There are many ways to reinforce an action. Telling a child that he has done a good job is just one way. It’s probably the simplest. Tokens are another kind of reinforcer. You can put a star on a calendar each time your child puts away his toys after playing. If she has a star for each day of the week, you can give her something that she values and that she would not have otherwise received. With tokens, your child must put off receiving the reinforcer for several days. Children over 5 years of age can do this, but younger children cannot. Younger children will need to be reinforced immediately upon picking up the toys. Another way to reinforce putting toys away after play is to let your child engage in a favorite activity after the toys are picked up. An important fact to know is that your child doesn’t need to understand that she is being reinforced for the reinforcer to be effective. That is, the act of putting toys away after play will be strengthened and will tend to occur more often when your child finishes playing with toys.
When you pick up toys with your child, you model the act for your child. This modeling does something extra, it teaches your child that picking up toys is something people do. Your child will soon generalize this to putting away other things. If your child never sees you picking up toys, then he will likely not see it as something that people do. One advantage for parents of modeling
is that when you model for your child, you are doing much more than showing them how to do something. You are developing a relationship with them. For parents, this adds an extra dimension to their teaching.
Modeling as Extended Teaching
Everyday you do things with your child. Your child is watching how you do things. When you are frustrated, your child is watching how you manage your frustrations. Watching you, your child is learning how to manage his frustrations. Whether or not you know it, you are the most important model in your child’s life. Your child is watching your actions in many different settings and watching you manage many different problems. Your child is always learning from you. But most of the modeling you do for your child is not systematic. You can systematically introduce some modeling into your interactions with your child and begin systematically teaching her.