Your child is likely to be your pride and joy. No matter how this child came into your life, whether through hours of labor, adoption, or any other means, there’s a good chance that you’re looking to give them everything you can so you can be sure that they’ll be ready to take on the world once they become adults. One great way to ensure that your child has all of the tools that they need to thrive as an adult is by enrolling them in a childhood learning center.
These centers go by a lot of different names. Preschools, daycare centers, the list goes on. The main goal of these facilities regardless of what the name is that they go by their goal is still the same. To improve the physical and mental wellbeing of your child while teaching them skills that they’ll be using for the rest of their lives. Child psychologists agree that these kinds of programs are incredibly important for the development of your children, but what exactly do they do to help? Let’s take a deep dive into the subject so you can be more well-informed about preschool programs.
Improve Your Child’s Physical Wellbeing
First and foremost, let’s look at the many physical benefits of enrolling your child in such a program. Some of these benefits are going to be pretty obvious while others might not be ones that you would have thought of when pondering this topic. There have been many scientific studies to back up these benefits and because of that, you can be sure that you’re doing the best possible thing for your child. Because your child’s mind and body are still developing, that provides them lots of opportunities to reap the benefits.
The most well-documented instance of the physical benefits of preschool is that it can help improve your child’s immune system significantly. There are many organisms that make us humans sick. Fungi, bacteria, viruses, the list goes on. When your body comes into contact with these organisms they can cause illness, infections, and diseases. That could be a bad thing if not for our immune system taking them out. There are a lot of parts of our immune system so we can’t really get too deep into detail about how that works, people spend their whole lives studying the immune system and still don’t have all of the answers, but you can be sure that your immune system becomes stronger when it meets these organisms.
The cells that specifically get better at fighting off various conditions are highly-specialized white blood cells known as B cells. When they encounter a foreign invader they create antibodies. With things like chickenpox and some other viruses, your body only needs to encounter it once and you’ll have antibodies for the rest of your life. By putting your child into a preschool they’ll be around other children, which means that their bodies will encounter all sorts of new pathogens that will result in a better defense later in life.
Another way that preschooler can help children is through physical activity time. This time is often called a recess and it gives the children a chance to run and play with each other. This playtime can easily be considered cardio exercise, and cardio is great for your heart. The NIH, or National Institute of Health, recommends that children get at least 60 minutes of cardio every day to make sure that their hearts grow healthy and strong. The amount that adults need is cut in half, but when your body is growing it’s good to make sure that there’s a good foundation.
These programs are also usually good about instituting physical activities as games. That can include things like tag, hide and go seek, kickball, and other games that require your child to get moving around. Of course, the games that any class has in place can vary depending on the ages of the children in the class, with more vigorous games for classes that have older children and less vigorous games for classes with younger children. This is to make sure that all the games that the children play are both safe and fair.
The Psychological Benefits of Preschool
Since we’ve already gone over the physical benefits of preschool programs, let’s look at the psychological benefits. Many child psychologists have spent years studying the effects of preschool on the mind of children and the conclusions that they’ve come to are overwhelmingly positive. Now, as it might sound, child psychologists are not children who are really into psychology but people that have decided to spend their lives studying the psychology of children. Children’s minds are still in big developmental phases, so there’s a lot to know about them.
The biggest and most well-documented benefit of preschool in this section is that children who have gone through a preschool program are more likely to exceed throughout the rest of their academic careers. That’s because most good preschool programs offer what is commonly referred to as educational enrichment. That just means that they have toys that are laser-focused to help children learn the basics before they go off to kindergarten. Sometimes that means that you’ll walk into a preschool classroom and be able to understand exactly what’s going on, and sometimes things will come off a bit more chaotic than that.
A good preschool teacher will be able to explain the purpose of every single activity that they have the children do. Good teachers put a lot of thought into everything in their classroom to make sure that it fills the need to teach the children something. The basics of academia are far from the only thing that children are learning when they’re in this kind of program. In fact, preschools provide students an opportunity to learn a litany of skills that will stay with them for the rest of their lives, often being used on a daily basis.
For example, one of the most commonly used skills that people have is social skills. We use social skills when we go to the bank, pump gas, go to work, find people to date, and even just when we’re hanging out with our friends and families. Having solid social skills can improve the quality of anyone’s life because it allows them the ability to make meaningful connections with other human beings much more easily than they might otherwise. That being said, the earlier one learns social skills the easier time they’ll have obtaining a mastery and learning how to navigate even the most complex social situations.
By putting your child into one of these programs, they’ll have to interact with the other students. Through these interactions, they’ll begin to grasp how social interaction should go. Of course, they’ll be new to the game so they’ll need to do a lot of work to master it. The name of the game isn’t to have your preschooler ready to be a social butterfly by kindergarten, it’s to make sure that the skills are implanted young enough that they’ll have a sufficient mastery before they become full-fledged adults and have to enter into the world.
Your child will be learning other skills as well while enrolled in such a program. For example, problem-solving skills. As humans, we face problems that need solutions every day. Some of those problems are minor and the consequences won’t make a big difference. For example, if the problem is that you’re hungry and there’s no food in the house all you need to do is go to the store or a restaurant. The worst consequence of this is that you’ll spend a little more money if you eat out rather than getting groceries and that you’ll be stuck in the same position next time you run out of food.
Your child is going to need their problem-solving skills so that they can be successful in this world. There aren’t many problems that can be solved if you lack these skills, and it can actually lead to healthier relationships with the people in one’s life if they have strong problem-solving skills. It’s a win-win for your child to learn how to solve problems when they’re young and most of the problems that they face aren’t going to have too dire of consequences rather than for them to make it to adulthood and not have this particular skill.
Give Your Children the Tools to Thrive, Not Just Survive
Every parent in the world is concerned about how their child is going to turn out. There are a lot of factors in the world that could potentially sway them one way or another. Fortunately, there are a few things that you can do to try and keep them on the right path to becoming a contributing member of society. Whether your child is the next doctor or garbage person, they deserve to have all of the skills they need mastered before they need them.