I'm Glad I'm Me! - Creating Confident Children
by Anna Blackett (Headteacher at LWSC)

One of the biggest challenges parents face is that of developing a healthy sense of self-esteem in their children. Self-esteem is a feeling of self worth or ‘good feeling’ about oneself. Children often judge this by how they are accepted and praised by peers and adults who are important to them. Positive self- esteem enables children to face challenges, work co-operatively and attain goals. Children who have a negative sense of self worth tend to focus on failure or problems and tend to avoid challenges.

One of the most effective ways to foster positive self-esteem is to help a child develop an “I can” mentality. Parents can do this in a number of ways:

• Encourage children to be independent
• Provide activities where children can achieve success
• Provide opportunities that are challenging but not too difficult
• Provide opportunities for children to practise skills that they enjoy or are good at
• Offer children the chance to express their ideas and feelings
• Offer children strategies for working co-operatively with others
• Offer real challenges where the child really feels they have achieved something
• Praise effort as well as attainment
  

Children need to feel that they are respected in order to feel positive about themselves. Parents can do this by allowing children to make certain decisions, but also by explaining the reasons behind adult decisions or rules. Also children should be included in conversations and have their views taken seriously. Reading and sharing books, discussing their school day and school work in a positive manner, asking about their peers and inquiring about how they are feeling are all key ways that a parent can reinforce their child’s sense of self worth.

During times of failure, such as a low mark for a test, a child’s feeling of self worth will be weakened. Parents can help to build self-esteem by reassuring the child that their support is still there. Parents should help their child to cope with failure rather than only emphasising their successes. Children need to be aware that life has both showers and sunshine so that they can cope with crises.

A parent making a positive statement in the morning can make the difference between a great day and a bad day for a child. However do beware of excessive flattery, as children will become dismissive of this. Praise children by heightening their sense of inner satisfaction and thus their internal sense of self-competence rather than just being an external source of esteem.
For example; be specific with praise by saying ‘Well done for writing all your letters so beautifully’ or ‘You knew so many of the words in that book’ rather than the more meaningless, ‘Good job’. Similarly negative statements such as, ‘Your work is so untidy’ or ‘You got such low marks’ are of no value and will simply decrease self-esteem. Critical comments should show an understanding of a child’s effort and should offer constructive ideas for future success.

For example; ‘You have come up with some imaginative ideas, perhaps you could try a different pen so that you can write a little neater’ or ‘I think you tried really hard with that test. Maybe if you read a little more you could do even better next time’. These statements show children that you are aware of the effort they have made and that you believe in them.

Parents play a crucial role in laying a solid foundation for a child’s sense of self worth. It is important to think about the impact that your words can have on an impressionable child. Having positive self-esteem can mean the difference between success and failure in school and in the outside world. Acknowledge and focus on what your children can do rather than what they can’t do and make them feel good about themselves.

Pre-school education - the facts
by Neil Andrew, BSc, PGCE

In the field of child development, most research indicates that children’s physical and emotional abilities, as well as the development of their mathematics, logic, language and music skills are powerfully affected by early childhood experiences. It is a widely held belief that the earlier children experience good care, the longer these developmental gains are likely to last.

At birth, the only fully developed areas of a baby’s brain are those governing the essential life processes of breathing, heart-beat, circulation and digestion. The centres controlling emotional growth, language, thinking and the capacity for problem solving develop constantly from birth until early adulthood.

The conclusion of the vast majority of developmental researchers is that there are specific ‘critical periods’ (also known as ‘windows of opportunity’) in the child’s brain development when areas of the brain are primed to receive specific kinds of information relating to particular areas of learning and other skills. In some cases, if these “windows of opportunity” are missed, it has been shown that the developmental stages concerned may not occur. Although the brain continues to mature and develop well into early adulthood, most of these critical periods occur before the age of six. To cite an example, the critical period for language development occurs in the first five years of life. At birth, babies are equipped to speak any language; however, each particular language uses certain unique sounds, and thus within the first year, babies are thought to become “functionally deaf” to a sound that does not occur in the language(s) to which they are first exposed. In the Singapore context, where nearly all children are raised in a bilingual environment, it is therefore all the more critical that this early ‘window of opportunity’ relating to language development is fully exploited.

The area of the brain governing vocabulary development (a prerequisite for learning to speak, read, write, learn and reason effectively) develops optimally during the first three years of life, as long as the child receives sufficient emotional, cognitive and language stimulation during this period. One recent developmental study concluded that babies with parents who talked to them for three hours per day or more had internalised, on average, 150 more words by the age of 20 months than peers with less talkative parents; by the age of 24 months, this initial gap had widened to around 300 words. During the preschool years, most research suggests that children continue to add to their internal vocabulary at a rate of roughly one word every 2 hours!

In conclusion, a child’s developmental outcomes are not wholly predetermined by their genetic makeup. The way in which a child is nurtured, together with their experiences during the first three to five years of life clearly play a very significant role in the development of their functional, learning and social competencies. This is why the importance of quality child care and parenting cannot be understated.

Worldwide developmental research has consistently shown that high quality preschool programmes can improve children’s long-term academic performance in school and even reduce later tendencies towards anti-social behaviour, delinquency and crime. By helping them to understand and use language, control aggression, play and work with other children, accept adult direction, focus attention and work independently at an early stage of development, effective childcare can drastically improve children’s chances of global success in school.

Following wide-ranging studies into the reasons why some preschool programmes are far more beneficial to children than others, a number of key strategies, or success factors, have been identified. These include: a high level of parental education and involvement, a clearly defined focus on language development activities, small class sizes and/or student-teacher ratios, programme continuity and investment in professional training.

A child’s early life experiences are some of the most important in terms of rounded development, providing the foundation for virtually all later learning. When learning skills, strategies and attitudes are optimally developed during the early childhood years, later learning has been shown to come more naturally to children.

We, as parents, need to remember that while the quality of the preschool we choose for our children plays a crucial role in influencing their development, it is just one of several environments being regularly experienced, most obviously that of the home. A child’s experiences within the family sphere certainly exert a significant influence on their development, but most family settings cannot provide them with the wide range of stimuli encountered in the company of other children in a well-rounded, high quality preschool environment.