Your nanny has a tremendous opportunity to be a positive influence on your child's intellectual and creative capacities in fun and flexible ways. This is one of the many benefits of choosing a nanny over daycare. In the last post on Supporting Your Child's Cognitive Development, we discussed the first three ways your nanny can do this. Here we address the final two.
Method #4. Offer choices. Your children will benefit from having choices at every age. It supports their their ability to weigh alternatives and understand the consequence of losing the unchosen option. Providing realistic choices also promotes their sense of agency and capacity for independent thinking, because making a choice is a mental action that must be learned. Adults who subvert their child's independent decision-making by making choices for them, hinder their child's ability to activate the mental processes that are required for making competent decisions.
Your nanny should offer choices to your young children as much as possible. With infants and toddlers she should limit the choices to 2 or 3, such as “peas or carrots.” Older children can manage a greater number of choices without feeling overwhelmed, and eventually make open-ended decisions (eg: What book would you like to read?). Doing this will also benefit her relationship with your children, since a nanny who habitually offers choices is perceived as inherently more amenable than one who doesn't.
Method #5. Scaffold social interactions and problem-solving. As we discussed in Part 1, “scaffolding” means supporting increasingly higher levels of sophistication in small, digestible doses that the child can absorb. It's a key concept that's applicable to encouraging learning and development in all areas, and at all ages (even adults). In terms of promoting social interactions and problem-solving, your nanny or au pair can scaffold your child by incorporating the following practices into her routine:
Infants and toddlers
Model and kindly encourage infants and toddlers to touch others gently
When talking about people, refer to their feelings (not their actions)
When social interactions go bad between toddlers redirect them to other things Do not punish them or lecture them, as they're too young to understand the consequences of their actions.
Children 5 and up
Model and gently encourage turn-taking
Suggest strategies regarding social interactions, such as taking turns, finding other toys
Empathize with the child’s feelings and add a discussion of other people’s feelings and perspectives
Perhaps most important, successful scaffolding requires a supportive, non-critical stance. Shaming a child is never constructive (and generally destructive). Your nanny should always assume, and treat your children as if, they're behaving in a problematic way because they don’t understand something. They need her help and encouragement to try a different strategy. (This is scaffolding!).
Check out the next post to learn what your nanny can do to Support Your Child's Language Development.
Based on research by:
Atkins-Burnett, Sally, Shannon Monahan, Louisa Tarullo, Yange Xue, Elizabeth Cavadel, Lizabeth Malone, and Lauren Akers (2015). Measuring the Quality of Caregiver-Child Interactions for Infants and Toddlers (Q-CCIIT). OPRE Report 2015-13. Washington, DC: Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation, Administration for Children and Families, U. S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Comments