We often mistake education to be within the confinement of bricks and mortar classrooms, with a teacher imparting knowledge of trigonometry and Shakespeare with content written on a green board with white chalk, at the age of 15.
What we overlook is that education starts at home, from the moment children open their eyes and start observing the world around them. For instance, a mother interacting with her newborn baby, using lots of colors and various sounds, helps in developing its cognitive abilities, and reactions. Another example of educating children is openly talking to them, and making them feel heard and understood.
Experiencing early learning and care directly from the parents, helps children to develop their social and emotional lobes, in the brain. It makes them gain mental stability and career success later on in life. A correctly stimulated and engaged child is most likely to perform and do well career-wise.
In short, the key role of parents in their child’s formative years is to leave a positive and lasting impression, along with valuable life skills and lessons that contribute to the child’s development, and decisions as an adult. Parents need to take interest in the child’s day-to-day activities and incentivize them to do better at school.
The most commonly asked question by new parents is about in what ways they play a role in their child’s education and development. Don’t fret, Mindler is here to the rescue!
The Role of Parents in a Child’s Education
1. Playing a Role Model
Family is a quintessential part of a child’s education. Providing a happy and positive growing environment has proven to be extremely beneficial in bettering the child’s mindset and cognitive mind. It is one of the primary roles of parents to ensure that a happy learning environment is provided to a growing child.
Studies show that children often choose their role models based on the kind of behaviour of the guardians that are portrayed in front of them.
Growing up, parents are the window to their child’s world and its first teachers. The child often sees its parents as role models or “superheroes”, and wishes to become exactly like them upon growing up.
Being role models for your child, you can teach them all things important about life, such as the importance of education, curious learning, and making efforts. If your child looks up to you, it will be easier for you to impart knowledge and values to them, and help them be better learners.
Parents can encourage and inspire their children to learn and observe the world from life inside and outside the boundaries of the school.
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2. Be Involved in the Child’s Activities
A role of parents in their child’s education is to participate in their children’s activities to give them the feeling that they are being supported. This makes them feel more confident about themselves.
Active participation of the parents also improves the parent-child bonding and builds trust and friendship between the two. Activities like reading, playing games, solving puzzles, are best to improve the child’s learning, problem-solving skills and improve bonding. Helping your child with homework, virtual learning, and preparing for tests is also a great way to bond with them.
We have 8 tips for parents to help kids improve virtual learning that will help you bond with your child better.
This helps children open up and talk about themselves, thus improving their social skills and interpersonal communication which is useful at school, and during adulthood as well.
3. Constructive Criticism
Oftentimes, the parents avoid pointing out to their children what they are doing wrong because it is believed that children tend to distance themselves from their parents if they feel that they are being criticized.
That may be true because criticism makes children (and adults) feel like they are being cornered and thus end up feeling alone. The key to healthy criticism is to make the person feel confident, notwithstanding the mistake and aiding them to fix the error without feeling “left out”, or as if they have failed.
Some friendly constructive criticism never hurt anyone. The role of parents in this situation is to sit down with them and work the problem out together, rather than telling the children what they are doing wrong and leaving them to correct their mistakes.
This will help the kids feel more confident and will develop a good problem-solving aptitude for the future.
4. Freedom to Choose
From the moment the child is born, parents start working and worrying about their career trajectory and life goals. Many times we see parents determining the child’s profession at the age of 2, and pushing it to work towards the occupation the moment they finish primary school. This adversely affects the child’s learning, making him biased towards a subject, and developing an aversion towards studies, marring his complete education and affecting his education in the end.
That said, another important role of parents in a child’s education is to unburden their children of all career expectations at such an early age and give them the freedom to choose a field they have an interest in. This way they will take an interest in their overall education while working extra hard in the subject they enjoy.
Additionally, setting them free of all assumptions, and future projections and letting them flow with their caliber and passion will make them trust you more, become their confidant, and improve the bonding.
Furthermore, if there is no bonding and communication between your child and yourself, how will you understand your child’s career aspirations?
5. Celebrate Your Child’s Success
We as adults may have experienced many happy occasions in our lives, but our children haven’t. To them scoring well in-class tests, making new friends, or being nominated as prefect will be a big deal. Let’s not forget that all this is a part of the children’s education, and any accomplishment however small is a sign of growth.
Celebrating your children’s achievements and rewarding them is an important role of parents in their child’s education. It motivates them to do better and improves their ability to retain knowledge and learn better.
Conclusion
As parents, we need to understand what’s good for our children and what is not, from the moment they are born. From healthcare and holidays to education we strive to give the best to our children.
However, on a mission to guide our child towards a successful life while dutifully playing the role of parents, we often tend to overlook some important aspects in our child’s education, that is way more important than our idea of a successful life.
Mindler is an ed-tech firm that offers online and offline career counselling services to students starting middle school, to higher education, through personalized field assessment and in-depth analysis.
Renowned as India’s best career guidance firm, it is solely dedicated to helping students in choosing well-suited careers through a plethora of well-researched career choices across various streams.
Confused about your child’s career trajectory? Take Mindler’s Career Counseling Online and help us help your child climb the career ladder today!
