According to statistics, India is home to 444 million children which is perhaps the highest child population in the entire world. Proper child development and pedagogy are the major factors in a child’s personality that start in childhood.
A child’s development is often very similar to that of a plant. We want plants to grow healthy, have fruits and flowers within them and can withstand sunlight. Similarly, if you want your child to blossom well in life and grow to the best of his/her ability, you should start your proper caring and parenting right from childhood.
Basics of child development and pedagogy
The proper meaning of human development caters to the process of change in someone’s personality. Be it physical changes, emotional changes, social changes or mental changes, each and every change accounts for the development of any human being living on this planet.
The stages of child development is mainly categorized on four stages:
- Initial birth stage (0-2years)
- Medieval stage (2-7 years)
- Operational stage (7-11 years)
- Adulthood stage (11- further being an adult)
The initial birth stage (0-2 years):
This particular stage mainly involves the senses of the child to develop their activities as well. They observe their surroundings very deeply and often try to imitate them.
Their brain also develops very systematically in this stage and their memory starts to function gradually.
They also learn to play with toys, and balls and get to do common playful activities with their parents and siblings.
The medieval stage (2-7 years)
This stage involves the improvement of speaking power of babies, and they gradually try to talk.
They also start to change their habits and lifestyles and starts to understand little things happening nearby.
The operational stage (7-11 years)
They develop physically very fast in this stage and can even do operations which are adultery and involves mature actions.
Their thinking develops and they start to think logically in every situation. However, they find difficulty in assuming things which are yet to happen, or matters related to mental thinking and conjecture.
Adulthood stage (11 – adulthood)
This is the final stage in the phase of child development and pedagogy which involves the children growing into mature adults. They start to understand the concept of abstract thinking and their mental power, ability to tackle situations also develops.
They also start to develop a logical system of intelligence and try to involve all possible happenings while working or thinking about any problem or situation.
Characteristics of child development and pedagogy
One of the major characteristics of childhood is self-centeredness. Children find it difficult to understand the perspective of every other person.
They believe their perspective towards anything is ultimate and there can exist no other perspectives.
However, as their age increases gradually, they start to understand the fact that there lie different perspectives of different individuals and theirs is not the ultimate.
As adulthood hits, they start to understand that they are not the center of everything and everything does not revolve around them like it used to in childhood.
One of the few characteristics that exists in children and rarely seen in anybody is polytheism.
Polytheism refers to the belief of worship in one or more God and the belief that every other object has a life.
Children often do presume that all objects have life and have consciousness just like human beings.
They feel that if we kick our chairs they might get hurt or if our water pump is not working, it might be tired just like ourselves. In short, they believe everything around them is like them.
Children normally focuses on a single thing at any given point of time. They tend to find it difficult to distribute attention to many things. This characteristic is called ethical realism.
This fact of ethical realism makes children capable of understanding protocols, rules and respect them.
Teaching strategies of child development and pedagogy
There involve several types of teaching strategies of child development. The techniques if applied appropriately could help a child blossom to the best of his/her ability in near future.
- Proper Pedagogy to children involves teachers conveying ideas, beliefs through storytelling method. This improves the vocabulary of many children and increase their power to communicate.
- Reading method is meted out to the students by teachers which help children to develop their emotional and constructive side.
- Practical method is often used by teachers as a method of pedagogy for teaching practical subjects to children related to any aspect. Children get the benefit of this method through live examples and demonstration.
All these methods involve the maximum effort of the teachers to their students. However, there are some other techniques also which involve the effort of both parties.
- Consultation method, which involves verbal exchange of talks between the teacher and student on a particular topic. This helps to improve the thinking as well as communicating power of a child.
- Probing method, in which the teacher assigns a task to his student and guides him. The student can solve those problems after acquiring the required knowledge.
- Detection method, in which the students find out the solutions to their problems through their own effort and in their own space.
- Collaborating method, in which students are asked to form a group to solve a real-time project based on real life experiences. This increases the interaction method of many children, and they start to believe in the concept of togetherness.
- Brainstorming method, in which students develop a series of ideas to solve some particular problems. This creative method of pedagogy increases the power of handling and tackling of any situation for the students.
Always prefer the holistic approach in developing a child
Children are always born very curious and of enquiring nature. All children living in this planet requires good grooming to solve their curious questions and their uncountable number of questions.
Parents should always develop a holistic approach in developing their child in everything. They should never implement their own ideas, thoughts and beliefs to their children.
There’s a huge difference in correcting and overburdening. A person should always correct their child but never burden them with their own beliefs towards anything.
When parents allow a child to grow and manifest on his own and gives him/her the proper space required in life, the child grows to the best of his ability and shines like the sun. To conclude it all, I would like it to end it again with a famous quote from F. Douglas,
“It is easier to build strong children than to repair broken adults.”
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