by Wendy Garrido
This is the seventh article in our eight-part series on Conscious Parenting Principles. Attention ° Emotional Support ° Responsible Choices ° Boundaries ° Independence & Community ° Good Communication ° Encourage Curiosity ° Role Models
Children enter this world with wonder, awe, and curiosity. Newly discovering the effects of gravity, inertia, and all the forces of life, they drop things on the floor, amazed at their power. “What’s this world about?” they wonder. “How does it work?” “What’s my place in it?” Once they learn to talk, they ask “Why?” over and over and over again. Their natural tendency is to explore, question, seek answers, and create more questions as they try to make sense out of their world.
As parents, we tend to lose our excitement about gravity after cleaning up all the food under the high chair. Instead, we focus on things like getting to school, work, and bed on time, cooking dinner, or finding lost toys. It’s easy to brush our children’s questions aside, or to say “Because that’s the way it is, now stop asking ‘Why’!”
We do our children a disservice when we shut down their curiosity, because they receive the underlying message that their thoughts and questions don’t matter, or are not as important as a schedule. This leads them to think that what’s important to them isn’t important to others or, for that matter, that their thoughts aren’t important to the world. They stop thinking about what delights their hearts and instead think about what they’re “supposed” to think about, and do what they’re “supposed” to do.
With infants and toddlers, you can encourage their innate curiosity by exposing them to a variety of situations to help them discover how things in this world work. For a baby, it might just be running their toes under cool water on a hot day and then under luke-warm water to let her experience the difference. Toddlers are amazed at watching toy cars slide through cardboard wrapping paper tubes. Help your child discover these small wonders and give her the time to explore. You might not think it’s that thrilling that the toy car comes out the bottom every time you put it in the top, but your toddler might watch it twenty-five times before gaining an understanding or losing interest with it. Follow her lead and revel in her discoveries—this is the beginning of a lifetime of learning.
As your children get older, the things they’re curious about might be outside your scope of knowledge or interest—that’s okay! It’s okay to say you don’t know the answer to your son’s question, or to tell your daughter that you really don’t think too much about why bugs have six legs while spiders have eight. You’ll soon discover, if you haven’t already, your children’s questions may exceed your own answers…that’s because they’re your “offspring,” springing off from where you have come. You are the base of their expanding world.
While many of us strive to do our best to keep that “free spirit” alive in our children, at the same time, we need to keep our own spirits up as we go through our daily routine. It can be exasperating to answer all those questions! Encouraging curiosity is about telling your child that you think it’s wonderful that she wants to know so much about bugs and supporting her as she finds the resources (websites, books, or people) that can help her delve more deeply into the subject. As a family, make a practice of keeping a list of questions you and your kids come up with throughout the week. If your kids are old enough to write, let them be the scribes. For younger kids, encourage them to draw a picture list of the questions to explore. Then make time once a week to research those questions you wanted to find the answers to. You might sit around the computer and take turns searching websites, or make a weekly trip to the library. Have each child pick a question to research, or if needed, they can ask the librarian for help. Then set aside time to discuss what they found.
When you encourage curiosity, you convey the message that the topics your son daydreams about—riding rollercoasters, being a chef, building skyscrapers, or caring for animals— are worthwhile; just as worthwhile as the knowledge and skills he learns at school. Help him discover that those skills he learns at school are relevant to his daydreams, and learning will have a whole new meaning. Suddenly he’ll be spouting off math facts faster than you thought possible. “Mom, did you know that since a rollercoaster ride lasts three minutes, I could ride 20 times in one hour?! Or…480 times in a whole day?! Wow! Awesome!”
Encouraging curiosity builds your child’s self-esteem. Children who are curious care about themselves and how they fit into the world around them. They believe that what they know, what they do, and who they are matters. They feel smart when they discover on their own how the world works. They feel important when they can tell you something they’ve learned. They have self-esteem from the inside because their positive experiences have created their sense of self. This self-esteem is essential as children face decisions about peer pressure, drugs, and alcohol. Children who value themselves and know that they have something significant to contribute to the world have less of a need for external peer validation because they have their own strong sense of internal validation. They don’t need peers, alcohol, or drugs to give them a sense of worthiness because they have already experienced their own worth.
There’s a lot you can do at home to support your children’s natural curiosity and love of learning, but it’s at least as important to make sure that their curiosity is also being supported at school. It’s easy for kids to lose their natural curiosity about a subject, if not the whole idea of “learning,” when they are asked to disconnect from their passions and interests. When your child is struggling with a class, remind her that it doesn’t mean that she’s not smart, it’s just that her teacher hasn’t found a way to explain it to her so that it makes sense.
As we support our children in their natural love of learning, it’s also important as conscious parents to evaluate our own innate curiosity and love of learning. How did our own parents encourage or shut down our curiosity? What subjects in school did we think we weren’t any good at? What subjects still cause us to shudder? Is it possible that the only reason we think we’re not good at them is because our teachers didn’t find a way to explain them to us that inspired our passion? It’s not “possible”--it happens!
All children are born loving to learn. One of the most important things we can give our children is the right to keep their love of learning alive. It is their right, their future, and our hope.
October 2007