If adulting is hard, then parenting is adulting on steroids. Why is it that the things that are good for kids are the things that it’s hard to get them to do? Imagine an alternate universe where eating spoonfuls of sugar and staying up past midnight was the healthy thing for your 7 year old to do. It’s hard to even fathom that level of cooperation which you’d get from kids. But alas, we must have made mother nature mad or something because it seems that you have to be the bad guy in order to be a good parent.
Helping your kids to develop a love of learning is one of the greatest gifts you can give them
One of the biggest battle grounds between parents and kids is around academic learning. It is hard to think of anyone who has achieved anything remarkable who didn’t at some point love learning. The ideal is that kids get self-motivated to learn so that you don’t always have to coax, beg, cajole, reward or sometimes threaten them to acquire skills. The most gratifying thing for us parental units is when we see our kids not just do their work because they have to, but also because they want to.
But for most of us, that almost never happens. It’s so frustrating because you remember how curious and eager to learn, these same kids were when they were babies. In fact, for the first couple years of their life, your efforts were mostly spent counteracting that curiosity so they didn’t end up like the proverbial cat!
Digital’s special power to help kids to love learning
There are probably tomes of articles that discuss why at some point the joy of learning goes poof for most kids. We suspect it has something to do with the fact that oftentimes fun is taken out of learning.
Enter Digital and the internet especially. Pretty much the saving grace of living in our time. With digital, you can give kids what they want – fun, engagement and entertainment. And at the same time, they will be learning. So here’s a reminder of why we proclaim nothing holds a candle to digital.
Digital let’s kids follow their interests
NOTHING beats the ability to find out information on any random topic than the internet. Today, you can go and find out if eyeballs sweat, whether goats dream or whether dragons fart fire too in addition to breathing it. It is so easy to find information on any topic that you can nurture whatever interest your child has. In the past, even if you were as privileged as the king of a land, your access to information still wouldn’t match what the internet makes available for every Tom, Dick and Harry today.
Digital resources bring learning to life
Nowadays most of us have a super computer in our pockets so it seems nothing special to be able to take and see videos at will. Just how funny can a verbal description of a funny cat be? But put a funny cat video and you have millions of days made better by the laughs they get. Digital learning resources and videos in particular bring learning to life in a way that hasn’t been possible before.
Digital has made it easy to gamify learning
About a 100 years ago, Dr Seuss’ illustrations and stories would have been the height of edutainment for kids. Today, thanks to digital, we are truly spoilt for choice. In the US alone, there are over 1500 learning apps focused on kids. In addition, there are 1000s of games and websites with educational content designed to try to hold the attention of kids whiles getting them fundamental concepts in math, language arts, science, social studies, problem solving etc. Never has it been possible to have as much fun as you can today, learning. In fact, it is us adults who often ruin things by pointing out to the kids that they are learning.
All evidence suggests that learning is more effective when kids are having fun! Without joy for learning, you can bet there will be no love of learning. So, take advantage of the resources brought to you by our digital age and give kids back that joy. Finally, you can be the good guy while being a good parent.
