Caring for a child is a responsible task in its nature. It involves various tasks starting from the simplest ones such as feeding or dressing a child to the complexities such as understanding child behavior and responding to them appropriately. Caring for children is done by both parents and professional caregivers. Both primary and secondary caregivers aim at providing best care for children ensuring they are healthy, safe, and happy at all times.
Ensuring that we all provide the best as well appropriate care that is necessary for a child’s growth and development is a crucial factor for developing a holistic child. What do we mean by growth and development? Growth concerns the development of physical aspects of a child that can be achieved through nutrition and physical care routines or activities. Development is a vast concept which addresses the advancement of a child in terms of their emotional, social, cognitive, language and spiritual aspects including physical aspect as aforementioned.
Therefore, in order to ensure that our care routines are appropriate, it is vital that we follow care practices that focus on improving each area of development in a child so that the child will begin to progress holistically. In other words, through our caring practices we enable a child to maintain a healthy balance between all these areas so that the progress he or she makes becomes more supportive for them to climb up through the developmental stages in early childhood.
Providing developmentally appropriate care necessitates understanding your child’s skills and abilities, being age appropriate when assigning tasks, having realistic expectations as well as facilitation of age appropriate play and educational materials for activities. However, each child is unique and therefore both primary and secondary caregivers should be mindful when understanding children’s behavior and the way their developmental needs should be met through various childcare practices.
Here are some important tips you can remember to ensure that you provide appropriate care while supporting the progress of your child’s development …
With regard to their behavior keep rules simple and easy for them to understand. This will motivate them to follow them.
Create safe and a child-friendly environment. This will help your child to freely engage in their activities without unnecessary interruptions.
Train children to do simple tasks for themselves such as buttoning their shirts, having their meals, or cleaning up their toys and offer simple choices. This will make them independent to a certain degree and increase their self-confidence.
Maintain clear and age appropriate communication. This will help develop their language and social skills. Encourage and train them to solve simple problems ex. solving a puzzle, finding a new way of doing something etc. to help develop their cognitive skills. Let’s not try to take away the opportunities where self-learning is taking place.
Often let them spend their day according to a routine. This will help them develop a sense of order and they will also enjoy the day by doing different tasks rather than spending long time periods doing few things.
Provide a variety of both group and individual play and learning experiences such as physical active play, quiet play, music, and movement activities to try.
Get their help for simple household tasks such as watering plants, cleaning up, providing care for pets, cooking etc.
Provide answers to their questions. When they are learning about the world they live in, they begin to ask various questions. It is important that we answer them as it increases their knowledge about the world.
