How To Help Your Kids Fall In Love With Lifelong Learning
This is a collaborative post
Learning begins as a baby and continues well into adulthood. But how do you get your kids to appreciate learning, and engage with it from an early age? As adults, most of us appreciate the value of social, academic, and physical education. Yet it can feel hard to reach your children and impart the wisdom you wish you’d listened to as a child. Here’s how to get your kids to fall in love with lifelong learning.
Engaging Young Children With Learning
A child’s natural curiosity about life begins as a baby and expands as they grow up and start to experience the world around them. There are many ways you can start to get your child excited and explore hobbies, interests, and certain subjects they want to study. Read on to find out about options to engage younger children.
Make Their Learning Interactive
All subjects can be made more engaging for a child if you make them interactive. Consider making games, treasure hunts, music, or creative stories based on their learning at school. You could try some of the following suggestions to make even the driest of subjects more interesting:
- Make up a song about learning your nine times tables
- Improve spelling by asking your child to make up a story using their set spelling words
- Arrange a treasure hunt and improve your child’s problem-solving abilities
It’s not always about school subjects either. Engage them in problem-solving and social activities to help them round out all aspects of their learning.
Take Them On Relevant Experiences
While it’s great to take kids out for the sheer fun of it, sometimes it can be beneficial to take them on relevant experiences. If they are learning about animals take them to the zoo, if they are doing a project on the Romans, take them to a relevant experience like Colchester Castle. Try to match their school subjects to your trip out to help them develop an interest and love of learning about that topic. If you take them to locations with interactive and child-friendly exhibits they’re even more likely to enjoy the experience.
Find Out What Type Of Learner They Are
Children and adults traditionally have four main ways of learning:
- Kinesthetic – learn through physical movements like exercise and hands-on experiences
- Auditory – prefers to learn by listening to music, conversation, or asking questions
- Visual – learn through seeing things, like looking at illustrations or diagrams, or drawing
- Reading/ writing – prefers to learn through reading or writing-based activities
While there is no rule saying they can only learn one way, in general, you might find they learn best under one of the above environments. If your child enjoys music or singing, they might engage more with auditory learning. If they enjoy art, they might gravitate toward visual learning. Kinesthetic learners tend to like to move around and excel at sports. Observe how your child learns best and try to mimic these with the events and activities you take them to.
Encourage Them To Talk About Their Feelings
Many adults struggle to define and talk about their feelings, so it’s only natural that young children may have the same problem. In fact, children don’t learn how to manage their emotions until the age of 5. The earlier you encourage a child to talk about their feelings, the better equipped they will be to thrive and enjoy life as an adult.
For younger children, you can help them explore their emotions in accordance with their learning preferences, e.g.:
Kinesthetic – ask your child to act out specific emotions, like anger, happiness, or sadness. Act out your own emotions and ask them to guess what it is.
Auditory/ visual – play some video clips of people acting out emotions and ask your child to guess what they are
Visual/ reading/ writing – draw some faces and ask them to draw the emotion written down. You can also ask them to match a drawn-out face to a particular emotion.
Helping them gain confidence in understanding their emotions will also help them with good mental health as a teenager and adult.
Enrol Them In A Foreign Language
The younger children are enrolled in a language class, the easier they will find it to become fluent as an adult. Learning a language opens up many doors for your children. They will be exposed to new cultures, people, and challenges. They will need to learn how to be understood by others who are not from the same background as them. Language tutors can provide personalised support and guidance, helping children overcome obstacles in their language-learning journey. Children that learn languages are on average better problem-solvers and critical thinkers. They also tend to be more resilient, better at coping with change and can concentrate better.
How To Get Your Teenager Invested In Learning
As your child grows up into a teenager, they might start to develop ideas of what they want to do as an adult. This can sometimes be scary, and they might feel overwhelmed. As a parent, you can both reassure and engage your teenager in some of the below ways.
Sign Them Up For Summer Classes
If your child is between 12 and 18, you can get them exposed to the academic rigour of university classes. This might help them feel less overwhelmed when they think about further education. Or, they might think it’s not for them, only to find they truly enjoy learning a particular subject. Try online Oxford scholastica online courses to give your child a taste of what they might experience in a University setting. The benefits of these classes are that many summer schools are online, leaving the evening and weekends free for the summer sunshine.
Talk To Them About Relationships
No parent wants to talk to their teenager about relationships. Yet it is an important part of life, and even as adults, we’re still learning. Share your own experiences and talk about the importance of open communication and clear boundaries. You should also share which boundaries apply to your home. It’s important to be honest with your teenager and encourage them to talk to you as much as possible. You’d hope they would come to you if they met someone to talk to you about their new relationship.
Have Conversations
Teenagers are only a decade or less away from their adult years and are developing their own opinions about their beliefs and the world around them. Engage them in conversation about their interests, their hobbies, and their values. You’ll get them more confident in expressing their ideas and ready to start conversations as an adult.
Check In With Them
As your children get older, it’s natural they’ll get better at managing their own emotions. However, teenagers are also going through many hormonal changes, which might make them subject to being more grumpy, or moody than they were as a younger child. However, if your teenager is sad, frustrated or angry for longer than a few days, you might want to check in with them and see how they are doing.
Support Their Ambitions
As your teenager grows up, they might start to form ideas about what they want to do when they become an adult. Support their ambitions as much as possible, and recognise that their goals and dreams might deviate from what you wanted to do as a child. They might want to do a vocational course rather than go to University, start their own business rather than work at the family one, or go to a University further away from home. Don’t let your own expectations of them cloud the support you should have for their ambitions.
Let Them Show Off About What They Know
Is your teenager particularly good at technology? Let them show off their IT prowess and help you with a particular tool, app, or device. The same goes for any subjects or activities they are particularly good at. Give them a chance to highlight their skills and show off the things they know really well.
Your Teenager Is Still A Kid
Your teenager is still your child, and as such there are several universal rules for kids that can help them engage in lifelong learning:
- Check in with them and encourage them to talk about their emotions
- Be supportive of their interests and do not dismiss them if their interests deviate from yours
- Encourage them to pursue their interests and activities
- Have open and honest conversations with them
- Engage them in conversations and encourage them to express their opinion
All of these steps are a vital part of making sure your kid feels safe and supported in pursuing the things they love.
Final Thoughts
No matter what age your child is, you can take steps to engage them in a love of learning. Younger children may benefit from hands-on activities and interactive events, while teenagers might benefit from being exposed to further education, debate, and research techniques. Teenagers naturally become more independent the older they get but will still benefit from the support and confidence that you can give them in pursuing their goals. Every child will follow their parent’s example, and it’s never too late to learn something new yourself.
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