Pango

Do You Want Your Kids to be Raised by Disney?

During a meet up with a couple of moms of small children at a park yesterday, they talked about how difficult it is to limit their children’s screen-time these days, especially when both parents are working and daycare is not a preferred option.

Mom 1: “I don’t want my boy to be raised by Disney!”
Mom 2: “My boy watches three Disney movies a day…”

It got me thinking. Too much screen-time for kids is an issue, yet even more of an issue is the quality of what they are consuming. These moms were on to something. Are kids' minds merely being entertained or are their minds being enriched and expanded?

It seems like just yesterday when my children were little like theirs. They hardly had any screen time. While I was homeschooling my kids, my son, who was four, would be in his room playing with Legos and listening to Susan Wise Bauer’s Story of the World audiobooks for hours EVERYDAY. https://welltrainedmind.com/c/history-geography/jim-weiss-history/?v=7516fd43adaa

To our surprise, he became a knowledgeable historian and a great storyteller. He was able to inform us about when and how the Chinese invented gunpowder, entertain us with the romance between Cleopatra and Mark Antony, describe to us how Caesar Nero did nothing to stop Rome from burning, and educate us on how WWI and WWII began, and all this before he “officially” started homeschooling.

So don’t let your children waste their precious minds and time merely being entertained. Pique their curiosity with fascinating stories, get their minds engaged with ideas that expand their awareness and that sharpen their critical thinking abilities. Set a limit to their screen-time, and be creative and innovative about providing alternatives.

So how do you make math enjoyable?

Math is a dreaded subject, but it should not be. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if your child looks forward to doing math homework daily like it’s playtime? The truth is it can be done and it should be done. Our children deserve to be presented the beauty and joy of math from a young age, and we parents owe it to them to learn how to make math enjoyable.

One of the simplest thing to do to make math enjoyable is, counterintuitively, to withhold your answer to a question that your child may have. Many parents think that all questions children have are to be answered by them. Nothing is farthest from the truth. When children have a math question that they cannot answer, that is when the fun begins.

Ask them to tell you why they cannot solve the question. Ask them what is the most difficult part of the question that they cannot answer. Ask them what the question wants. Ask them to put the difficulty in words for you. Many times before you finish asking them questions, they gain clarity and they would exclaim, “Oh! I see it now!” You just made math enjoyable for them.

So instead of giving them the answer, you help them explore the question. By engaging them in looking at the problem from different angles, you guide them to find the solution themselves. This is much more empowering and satisfying for them to conquer the problem themselves than you providing the answers for them.