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Health & Fitness

How to Build a Problem-Solving Preschooler?

How many times have you caught yourself saying, " Did you see that, my child was able to figure that out". Preschoolers begin to think critically and problem solve from the moment of birth.

All young children are explorers and investigators, curious about the world around them. The instant a child is born they begin to look around observing their surroundings. A baby as young as a few months old begins to solve problems such as how to obtain a mothers attention by crying to receive food or be coddled. This learned stimulus/response behavior is just the beginning of a child learning how to use critical thinking to solve a problem.

When a child is 8 months, he/she begins to have controlled grasp as well as object permanence*, this consists of a child grasping for an object or pulling himself up to get to a certain place or toy. The strategies used for problem-solving are already being instilled in the child and can display the type of thinker the child is beginning to be.

Before a child can communicate, motor skills are a critical tool for functionality in a social and physical environment such as grasping, pulling, and crawling, which allows the child to seek out new encounters and people. The overall goal of a parent at this time is to not “teach” your child but help her/him to discover the world around them to help organize each experience.

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As your preschooler begins to discover their mind and how it works, both right and left hemispheres are beginning to communicate with one another improving a child’s ability to understand the properties of ambiguous objects. As the child’s cerebral cortex continues to develop the sub cortical areas of the lobes are developing as well. These lobes include: Occipital lobe-vision, Parietal lobe- touch and spatial understanding, temporal lobe- hearing and many aspects of language and the frontal lobe- consisting of the motor and prefrontal cortex for regulating body movements, reasoning, memory, self-control, attention, planning and judgment. Each of these lobes has a right and left side function in each hemisphere, when stimulated correctly, it will assist the motor, visual, touch and auditory development of your child.

In order to develop all of these areas in the brain it is important to focus on helping the child make physical and mental connections through lots of self-organizing play activities rather than emphasizing or memorizing specific bits of information. Because of the immaturity of these lobes it is crucial to expose the child to as many experiences to nurture each of the lobes to improve the “wiring” and development of the child.

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So what can you do as a parent to encourage divergent thinking* with your child?

  • Remember at 20 to 36 months your child’s brain is buzzing for extra connections and get sorted into concepts, relationships and patterns of meaning
  • Introduce skills of sequencing and patterns- arranging objects and talk in abstract sequencing such as “if you don’t take a nap, you will be tired later”
  • Mental patterns help to build sensory connections. The term “schemas” were used by Piaget to describe mental hooks that are combined to form a child’s structure of thought.
  • Give your child the ability to organize their own play
  • Read aloud frequently and look for patterns in stories and ask open-ended questions like, “What would happen if…?”, “Why do you think that happened?”
  • Most importantly, give the child time to THINK and ANSWER!

*Object permanence is the understanding that objects continue to exist even when they cannot be seen, heard, or touched. It is acquired by human infants between 8 and 12 months of age via the process of logical induction to help them develop secondary schemes in their sensori-motor coordination

*Divergent thinking is a thought process or method used to generate creative ideas by exploring many possible solutions

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