child development

This week out teacher was Leslie Freeman and she was teaching about child development. Leslie has been involved in YWAM for many years and has a degree from the University of the Nations (YWAM’s university) in education. Leslie and her husband (our speaker for the previous week) have 4 young boys and during the week we heard many different stories bout them relating to child development. This week there was a good mix of facts, readings, quotes, stories and practical things for us to get through which keep us engaged.

A couple of things stood out to me from this week’s teaching, the first being the importance of having realistic expectations of your children. Leslie took us through the developmental stages of infancy through to high school age and what struck me was that parents, siblings, babysitters etc. expect infants to behaving in certain way according to our expectations. But often the child simply isn’t at that developmental stage yet and is not capable of such behaviour. For example, a toddler cannot cognitively understand the difference between on purpose and by accident so we cannot really ask them if they did it on purpose as they will probably respond with ‘yes’ and then we will punish them for what was an accident.

Another thing that stood out to me from this week’s teaching was how detrimental it can be to a child to surround them with rules. We can’t expect children to know how to behave in a new situation if we never give them the chance to be in new situation i.e. we have rules for every situation so they never have to think about what they need to do and then when they are faced with something new they will not know how to figure out the appropriate response.

These two things have challenged me in how I have and do work with children. When I look back over my years of working with children in all sorts of situations I see many mistakes I have made and after this week’s teaching I see a whole lot more. I do not feel too guilty about it because I know it is quite normal and no-one is perfect but I do feel better equipped to work with kids in the future.

There is one thing that I would have liked to cover this week but we didn’t; the difference in development across cultures. I know there are some things in development that are the same across cultures but I don’t know what those things are and I would like to.

I have been saying for a couple of weeks that I need some baby therapy, meaning I miss playing with babies and little kids, and yesterday I had the opportunity to go to a local orphanage and cook up to 20 kids breakfast. It meant and early start for me but it was well worth it. After we had cooked the breakfast for the older kids I got to go hang out with the babies. I got vomited on, spat on and made some little kiddies smile so I was happy.