Micah 6:8

Educating Toddlers

For those of you that don't know, I've got two toddlers that I'm staying home to raise. Eventually I'm planning on homeschooling my kids. I've recently started thinking about being more intentional about teaching them some academic things like shapes and colours. I was discussing this with my husband and he made a very good point. He pointed out most of the focus in our society is to teach children academic things and we tend to under teach constructive inter-relational skills. I think that this is very true. I think that part of the reason for this is that academic skills are quantifiable. I can look and see that Faith now knows what the moon is or that Paul is counting. We can measure our progress. With inter-relational skills and emotional skills progress is harder to notice or quantify. We can't easily determine how our child measures up to other children. I think that it is a lot more difficult to focus on this because our insecurities feed our desires to see our kid as the best and so we naturally fall into trying to make our children the brightest on the block. For myself I know that I struggle to realize that I don't need to buy my kids fancy educational toys or craft supplies in order have them grow into healthy intelligent adults. A loving stable environment will take them miles further than these aids would. I'm going to try to pour more attention into building my children up emotionally.