Raising Your Child Better

Parenting, as most parents will admit, is a skill you learn on the job. You can read all the parenting books in the library but your child will not play to the script rendering everything you’ve learned useless.

You have to parent according to the particular needs of your child and how you want them to grow. There are a lot of what-ifs, as a lot of the impacts of the moment get to manifest not immediately but later as they continue to grow.

The first to be a better parent for your child is to understand them well, especially their personality.

Personality

By broad definition, personality is the repetitive thoughts of an individual, how they feel to certain stimulations and behave towards them, which distinguish them from the next person. The types of personalities are better explained by a psychologist.

A personality type tends to show itself much early in a child’s life. This can be even before language is learnt. From this basis, the child develops with influence from the environment around him or her. Environment would mean, the social setup around them. How their siblings relate and treat them or if they are an only sibling and have to chart their own path. These stimuli eventually inform the kind of person that the child turns out to be in their adulthood.

Parents tend to play a big role in character development of the child as they are the primary window into the workings of the world before they step into formal institutions of learning.

Learning

Knowing the way your child absorbs knowledge, the pace at which they do it and how they retain it is relatively easy. Most children tend to fall into three broad categories; visual learners, audio learners and finally the touchy and feely learners.

The visual learners tend to absorb new knowledge best through what they see, says Mom Crib. This includes reading from books or even watching from a tutorial. They tend to work best alone as they need to learn it themselves.

The audio learners tend to absorb information best by way of hearing. This type of child would tend to pick up a new language better by hearing it from a tape being played to them rather than reading it from a book.

Once a parent identifies their child’s personality behavior and the method of learning they are most comfortable with, then they are in a better position to interact with him or her from a point of knowledge, that of knowing your child.

Type of learner

The touchy-feely learner, also referred to as kinesthetic learner learns best by interaction. The child has to touch and feel the subject they are learning about, know how it works. This child will tend to break their toys to see what the inside looks like while still playing with it. Learning outside and experiments will favor this. However, since the class experience tends to target audio-visual visual, it will favor the other two categories more.

This doesn’t means that one type of learning is superior to the other, but rather that they are different. These types of learners are also not mutually exclusive. A child will tend to respond well to all the types of learning methods.