Your Child’s First Teacher

This guest post is from Bob Ditter.  Bob is the most widely recognized consultant to the camping community and is renowned for his expertise in the field of child and adolescent development. As a former director of a day camp for emotionally disturbed children, he knows that camp directors are continuously challenged to deal with psychological issues that affect their campers, parents and staff.  You can find more information about Bob at http://bobditter.com.

Parents are always their child’s first and most important teacher. We tend to their basic needs when they’re infants, encourage and woo them when they’re toddlers, read to them and initially open the world to them. Because children are attached to their parents from the beginning of their lives, parents are profoundly impactful in ways that resonate over years. What is less obvious is that children actually learn how to attach to others through the experience they have in the attachment to their parents. More on that in a bit.

There are three ways parents teach children. One is what I call “top, down,” which is using words to explain or describe things or to say what it is we expect in terms of their behavior. While it certainly makes sense to tell children what we expect in terms of their behavior, “top, down” isn’t necessarily the most powerful method of teaching our kids.

A different, more subtle, yet more powerful and lasting way of teaching is to model the behavior we want our children to emulate by living it ourselves. How we as adults talk with and negotiate with one another (or don’t); how we show respect for one another (or don’t); how we support one another (or don’t); how we fight with and recover or repair our wounds (or don’t); how we treat others outside the family or in the extended family or how we treat pets and animals and our environment are all things children watch and imitate. The good news is that children, like monkeys, watch and listen and mimic everything we do and say. The bad news is that children, like monkeys, watch and listen and mimic everything we do and say. Indeed, the most common way human beings learn is by mimicking and recreating the things we see and hear. Modeling is a “bottom, up” kind of learning in that children experience our behavior through their senses, then once they’ve had that experience, give it a name or label (or don’t, which then makes it harder to retain and develop into a character trait or strength). Having an experience, with a context and an emotion attached to it, is usually a more memorable, that is to say, lasting kind of learning.

A third way children learn is when we recognize something they are doing or saying and either reward or discourage it. “Catching a child in the act of doing something right” is an important and powerful way to reinforce that behavior. (There is a paradoxical exception to this when it comes to Teens, who may temporarily find anything a parent praises them about as a terrible source of embarrassment if it is done too publicly!)

At some point, usually around the time children head off to school, they discover other “teachers.” In fact, one central job of any parent is to put them in the company of other interesting, appropriate adults who can broaden their experience and sense of the world, thereby expanding their sense of themselves. This is, in fact, what camp is—a rich collection of “teachers” ready to introduce children to an entirely different world of adventure, social learning and mastery.