Nurture is just as important as nature when it comes to learning. You can stunt a natural bookworm’s curiosity by not fostering their willingness to learn. Conversely, you can inspire a school-hating kid to be academically inclined when you nudge them in the right direction.
I used to fear my boy wouldn’t do well academically because he found schoolwork a chore. Fortunately, I was able to reverse his reluctance to study and spark an interest in education by making conscious decisions to keep him constantly thirsty for knowledge.
Start Early
Children are more exploratory than adults. The rapid boost in GABA in kids after learning sessions helps explain why children learn more efficiently than grown-ups. This neurotransmitter helps stabilize the neural network, allowing the brain to consolidate new information without overriding what’s already in storage. Your young ones’ brains are like fresh sponges that can quickly soak up memories.
Take advantage of your young ones’ propensity for knowledge-seeking. The earlier you instill a love for learning, the better. Leverage your children’s natural inquisitiveness to keep their desire to understand the world around them burning. Welcome questions and answer them thoughtfully, no matter how silly they may be.
What if your kids are already adolescents? Does that mean it’s too late? No, it doesn’t.
The brain regions linked to higher-order thinking are more plastic during early adolescence. These skills include critical thinking, metacognition, comprehension, application, evaluation, synthesis and inference. Metacognition is being aware of how you think, while synthesis combines multiple ideas to create a new, more meaningful one.
If you didn’t nurture your kids’ curiosity when they were younger, it’s not too late. Adolescent brains are still malleable, so encourage your children to be more evaluative, creative and innovative. This way, they can be better equipped to spot misinformation and disinformation, determine valuable insights, form original opinions based on facts, and read between the lines.
Make Home Conducive to Learning
Eliminate as many stressors in the environment as possible. Examples include shared learning space, poor lighting, uncomfortable furniture, incomplete supplies and an irregular routine. Distractions like toys, loud sounds and passersby are attention thieves.
Do your best to create a stress-free and focus-inducing learning home environment for your little ones, regardless of age. Even school-age kids spend considerable time at home.
More importantly, instill a growth mindset in your children. Telling them that abilities are earned instead of innate encourages them to work hard to improve themselves and not fear making mistakes.
Be Careful of Misidentifying Learning Styles
Do you want to know how to teach a child to learn effectively? First, determine what type of learner your kids are.
The four learning styles are visual, auditory, reading and writing, and kinesthetic. Visual learners absorb illustrative information quickly. Auditory learners want things to be heard or spoken. Reading and writing learners understand text-based information better. Kinesthetic learners strive through tactile experiences.
Granted, learning styles are more theoretical than factual. Still, there’s no denying that education is a complex process. Kids find some concepts easier to understand and remember through certain mediums than others. For example, reading books is universally accepted as an effective learning method but may not work for those with other preferences.
Sticking to a single style is a losing strategy. Instead, observe your children’s behaviors to know which method works best for them when understanding specific ideas. That way, you can avoid misusing a less effective medium in a given situation.
For instance, taking kids to a natural history museum may be the best way to help them grasp the size of dinosaurs and compare them to their surviving descendants, like the cassowary. Hearing vocalizations may aid their imagination better than reading descriptions of what these extinct giants may have sounded like.
Pick an Above-Average School
Attending a school that demonstrates higher academic performance can speed up the brain’s white matter development, especially in the area related to reading skills. White matter aids your children’s cognitive abilities, including learning and focus.
This scientific observation establishes the link between the school environment and the growth of physical brain properties. Strong attendance correlates with accelerated cognitive maturity, regardless of household income, parental education, family conflict level and neighborhood.
Teachers are just as responsible for encouraging your children’s willingness to learn. Give them the best education possible to help them think older than their age.
Go Beyond Hard Sciences
Many parents explore how to teach a child to learn activities that favor STEM subjects — science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Although excelling in STEM is a reliable predictor of success in life, adding arts can deliver a more desirable academic outcome.
Open-ended activities like music appreciation motivate kids to explore possibilities without inhibitions. Creative pursuits encourage observation of surroundings and people, teach spatial awareness, spur out-of-the-box thinking, fuel introspection and enhance social skills. High schoolers with a strong foundation in arts translate to higher SAT scores, opening more college doors.
Keep Their Hands Busy
Giving your children hands-on tasks can help balance memorization-heavy classroom activities. It can be a nice change of pace, allowing them to discover and explore new concepts with vigor.
Using your kids as assistants when gardening, building something or fixing your vehicle is a good idea. However, your young ones don’t need to get their hands dirty to learn something literally. Involving them in everyday activities will suffice.
For example, you can teach your children financial literacy by letting them budget their allowances or grocery shopping with them. Giving them support roles when doing household chores introduces them to home maintenance basics. Find ways to turn ordinary experiences into teachable moments.
Promote Multilingualism
The ability to speak more than English helps encourage cross-cultural curiosity and understanding. Deciding which tongue to use when talking with someone is focus-enhancing mental gymnastics. Considering the English-speaking world consists of only 7.3% of the global population, multilingual kids can interact with more people from various backgrounds and access more economic opportunities worldwide.
Spanish is the easiest language for a child to learn in the United States since it’s the most commonly spoken after English. American high schools offer it as a minor, and students can improve their competency level from basic to advanced through practice by interacting with native Spanish speakers.
Willingness to Learn — A Balance of Nature and Nurture
Raising lifelong enthusiastic learners requires well-thought-out parenting decisions. While you cannot control your children’s keenness to gain knowledge, you can instill the ideal mindset and behaviors to seek and retain valuable information they need to succeed.