Floating Coconuts: Keys to helping your child succeed!

Teaching someone a new skill or sharing knowledge is always easier when there is a relationship. Much like building a house, a foundation must be laid and it is well known that the higher up you want to build, the deeper the foundation needs to be dug and reinforced. What a beautiful analogy for how we must approach the beautiful process of learning for both children and adults!

Good teachers know how to do this well. They start a new school year by getting to know their students. The essay many of us thought was annoying, ‘What I did during the holidays’ was not just a way to waste student time; it did tell teachers a lot about how a child and their family usually spent their free time. Every teacher will tell you how easily children divulge personal details of family life; a wise teacher uses that to position material so that it lands exactly where it is likely to be absorbed and used well.

In 1991, an Indian anthropologist went where no one had dared to go. Madhumadar Chattopadhyay joined a team of researchers visiting the Sentinel Islands in the South Pacific to acquaint themselves with a tribe that had, by choice, little to no contact with the outside world. Several stories about the Sentinelese indicated they were dangerous and as such, the plan was to leave bags of coconuts without being seen by the tribespeople. This was done several times but didn’t achieve much since they remained unseen. Madhumadar decided to try something different; she rolled out coconuts in the water, one at a time. The notoriously violent tribespeople saw it as a game and started participating. This was peaceful contact and although the visit was not extended, Madhumadar and her team taught researchers around the world about patience with new things, the use of play to gain trust, and the importance of building relationships to ensure success in learning. Hence my title...Floating Coconuts.

Parents often wonder how to make children learn at home. Many of the attempts border on the aggressive, with physical punishment held as an option if a child doesn’t learn. Children have difficulty perceiving learning as critical because the rewards seem to take so long to be realized while adults on the other hand are easier to convince; they have more evidence of what lies in store after that certificate, diploma, or degree. Few children can comprehend this, and those that do, are likely to be parroting their parents. Using fear and intimidation as a foundation for learning is detrimental to the growth and development of children; we end up creating damaged adults who have little use for the process of learning or anything that is associated with it.

For our children to enter a learning space willingly, we must prepare the proverbial ground for it. Here are three very simple tips for preparing that ground and changing the narrative for our children:

(1)   MODEL active learning by letting your children see you learning. Children copy a lot! Let them see you learning so they can seek to model the process.

(2)   OBSERVE how your child learns. Learning is not just the preserve of academic subjects such as Maths, English, and Science. Observing children learning non-academic skills can give a clue as to how they learn. Does your child learn by ‘doing’? Do they like

touching things, feeling them, squeezing them to determine what to do next? Do they like moving around physically as they learn? Do they create songs for even mathematical concepts? There are different learning styles and once you find your child’s learning style, you’re halfway there in finding out how to make content stick!

(3)   CELEBRATE them when they learn something new. No matter how little, celebrate it! Children (and even adults!) are motivated to do more when they know that what they’ve already done is worthy of note and appreciated. This can be as simple as saying ‘well done’ or congratulating them in front of others. You can take it a step further and set reasonable targets for them to reach with stated rewards at the end. My favourite reward is a book and this sends a message to the child that a book is a treasure!

Some of us might balk at some of these ideas because we didn’t quite experience this approach in our homes when growing up. Our parents and teachers may have held the belief that this would ‘spoil’ us and stop us from striving. We point to our current successes as evidence that the approach was not bad...that rethinking our approach to motivating children to learn is unnecessary. However, we need only to look at our changing world and the complexity of what we term success to realize that we must think differently about what we have always known. As Alvin Toeffler says “The illiterate of the future are not those who can't read or write but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn”. It’s time for us to start ‘floating coconuts’ and creating a strong foundation by learning how to unlearn some methods that are okay, but are not good enough in today’s creatively competitive world.

For more education and parenting insights, visit www.maryashun.com and subscribe to listen to Dr. Ashun’s podcast on similar topics.