How much academic rigor is appropriate for a three-year-old? That’s a question that weighs on the minds of many young parents. It’s easy to go overboard. It’s also natural to worry about ensuring your child is ready in every way to succeed academically.
What’s the appropriate response? For many parents, it’s all about finding balance—letting your child be a child, but also ensuring that they’re developing skills that will follow them throughout their academic careers.
In this article, we take a look at what parents of young children should do to get their child’s academic journey off on the right foot.
Overview: What Objectives Are Appropriate And Which Are Excessive?
One thing that’s worth recognizing is that pretty much all of the skills we’re going to describe in this article are things that preschool is actually designed to teach in the first place.
Pre-K and kindergarten are both primarily about learning how to learn. That said, they’re also the stages where early literacy and mathematical skills are developed.
The more well-suited your child is to early academic circumstances, the more they will benefit from the actual instructional components. In the next few headings, we look at simple, stress-free ways you can get your kid ready for preschool.
Daily Reading
If you’re only going to do one thing on this list, make it daily reading. Children learn a lot of early literacy skills simply by experiencing language through storytelling.
A book a day takes only five minutes. It serves as an excellent opportunity for bonding, and it may even ignite a love of reading in your young child.
Develop A Responsive Relationship with Your Child
Naturally, social-emotional skills are an important element of both life and academic success. The skills your child develops to process difficult emotions at home are equally valuable at school.
Work on having an open relationship concerning emotional literacy. Just being able to name feelings is an important aspect of processing them, and it’s a habit that most preschools will also work to develop.
If your child already has a strong level of emotional literacy, it can go a long way toward supporting academic success. Your efforts on this front do not need to be formal or structured.
Even having open, supportive conversations with your child can be a meaningful way to help them feel emotionally supported and comfortable with self-expression.
Even narrating what your child is doing around the house can be a strong step toward improved emotional awareness. As an added benefit, it is also a form of language development.
As your child talks and narrates their activities, they are also learning more language to use in describing the world around them.
Develop A Healthy Relationship Surrounding Technology
It is worth mentioning that “healthy,” in this case, could mean very restrictive. Three- and four-year-olds really don’t need any screen time at all.
They can possibly benefit from a limited and supervised amount of it, but most studies indicate that even educational apps or television programs are not as beneficial as reading or artistic expression.
If you are going to provide your child with access to digital technology, make sure that it is in limited and supervised doses, and prioritize educational content.
Many parents reach for digital technology as a way to keep their children occupied when they cannot provide direct attention. This is a natural and understandable impulse, but also one that may create more problems than it solves.
In actuality, most children will do fine with unsupervised, unstructured playtime as long as they’re given other opportunities—for example, books, coloring materials, and toys.
None of this is to say that digital technology exposure is always a bad thing. There are educational apps for toddlers that have been shown to produce good school-prep-related results. They just aren’t a substitute for other forms of intellectual or emotional development.
Play!
Play is the primary occupation of children who have not reached school age. It is a valuable way to develop language skills, problem-solving abilities, and foster imagination in a way that is genuinely useful for school.
Some parents worry that they are not naturally good at playing with their children. Understand that it is really not a terribly difficult skill to develop. You don’t need to have a natural talent for pretend time or storytelling—just follow their lead. They’ll put you to work.
As a bonus, it is also a really great way to bond with your child.
Recognizing Concerns
If you’re concerned about your child’s development, it is okay to seek professional support. Before you do so, it’s a good idea to check in with your general practitioner.
They have benchmarking criteria that will help you understand where your child is at in terms of developmental milestones. There is a fairly broad spectrum of what is normal, and you needn’t concern yourself simply based on comparisons to what you’ve noticed in other children.
That said, if you are noticing significant language or communication issues, that is worth looking into. Speech-language pathologist services can be an extremely impactful solution to this problem.
While your child’s school, and most likely even preschool, should have these services on offer and for free, it is also not at all a bad idea to seek a consultation.
It is true that out-of-pocket services can be expensive, to the tune of up to $200 per session, but even several consultations can help your child—and you—develop impactful skills that will help them down the line.
Enjoy Your Time with Them
Don’t focus on development at the cost of everything else. Look at the earliest years of your child’s life as a deeply enjoyable and impactful time to establish a connection.
That is your primary responsibility and the most fulfilling experience you can have with them.
That said, you can kill two birds with one stone by focusing on bonding activities that are beneficial to your child. Reading, playing, and communicating are enjoyable experiences that also have the benefit of getting your child ready for school.
