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Affirmations to Help Your Child Learn About DOING THINGS

BY ARLENE F. HARDER, MA, MFT

"Cleaning your house while your kids are still growing is like shoveling the walk before it stops snowing."

— Phyllis Diller

In this developmental stage the task is to move out in the world, explore, and develop a sensory awareness by doing. Inquisitive babies are too young to learn self-discipline and unable to share, so caregivers need to provide a safe environment and limit's "no's" to important issues, helping children "to do" as well as "to be."

Thus, children of this age will sit on the floor playing with toys and when a ball with a rattle inside rolls out of their reach, they will crawl after it and pick it up with delight, exploring it in their mouths to get a taste of it. They'll hold it in their hands to see what it feels like, squealing with delight at the colors and the noise it makes when they shake it. In such an atmosphere they experience how much fun it can be to explore their world.

Affirmations needed by all babies from six to eighteen months of age—and by everyone else as well:

We encourage you to be curious.

You can use all of your senses to discover the world around you.

When you explore, we will support and protect you.

We love you when you are active and also when you are quiet.

We delight in your discoveries.

We know that learning to do things by yourself is fun.

Now that you know the importance of affirmations for this stage, be sure to read Putting into Practice the Affirmations for Your Baby . By using those suggestions, you will be laying a firm foundation for your child's emotional, physical, and mental growth throughout life.

One final comment. While all children move from one stage of growth to another, they do so at different rates. This is particularly true of the early years when progress is measured in weeks and months rather than years. Therefore, even though the Childhood Affirmation Program breaks down the first three years into three stages, your child may enter or leave a stage sooner or later than another child and be perfectly okay. That is why some of the resources suggested for one stage will be true for children of a different age and are listed in more than one stage.

Budding Scientists

What is a scientist? It is someone who observes some aspect of the world and hypothesizes about what is happening, makes predictions of what will happen next or what will happen again, classifies information into categories, experiments with the information collected, and communicates her findings to others.

That is why a young child is a scientist in the making. Children are naturally curious, active, self-motivated learners about the world around them. The more the adults in their lives encourage this curiosity, the more they encourage the potential scientist in them.

After all, what does a child this age do? They reach out for toys, they compare what they see and do to what they've seen and done before. Sitting on the floor watching a ball roll down a ramp, they try again. The ball rolls again. Again. And again. Then they try a block and it doesn't move. Doesn't roll. Hmm. Something is strange here. Wonder what is going on.

It's great fun to watch a baby explore the world. It's even more fun to realize that by giving your baby opportunities to see, touch, smell and hear many difference things, by giving them words for their experiences even though they may not be able to pronounce or remember the words right away (but will with repeated experiences), you are giving them a great start in learning how to be observant and enthusiastic about learning. Maybe you have on your hands the next great Einstein.

A word of warning, however; you don't have to have all the very latest battery-operated toys and gadgets and a room filled to the ceiling with "stuff" for your child to explore. Pots and pans have been used by children for centuries to teach them how one size fits into another. See the sidebar of Putting Into Practice the Affirmations for Your Baby.