You and your preschooler
The preschool years can be a delightful time for families. The children
are now beyond the age when their physical care was a wearisome chore.
And they have not yet reached the age when they will be so wrapped up in
school demands and friends that parents feel squeezed out of their
children’s lives. Parents are lucky—and obviously the children are
lucky—when whole families can find time to enjoy these years together.
These years are a time for companionship—a time for walks together and
for short trips. They are a time for shared experiences at home.
Youngsters have their moments of wanting to work along with parents,
helping in their own way with cooking, cleaning, and other interesting
household and yard chores.
These years are a time for words, for stories, and for music. They are
the years for listening to children and for talking with children.
Children’s questions ask all about the ins and outs of our world and
give parents the most magnificent teaching time for explaining and
interpreting for children. The preschooler’s behavior gives parents many
opportunities to talk about values and about discipline.
These years are a time for the shared awe and delight in the charming,
never-ending variety of our world of bugs and nuts and bolts, of
clamshells and cars, snakeskins, leaves, the birth of baby kittens, and
the hot, smoky smell of a truck engine.
Parents who work outside the home must make careful plans to find the
time to share all this with their children. The special effort it takes
proves very rewarding to parents and children alike.
Lucky parents and lucky preschoolers enjoy many times together. But wise
parents know that even at this early age children need more than their
parents. These are wonderful years for youngsters to come to know well
their wider family of grandparents, uncles, aunts, and cousins. These
are the years when parents can help their children find friends in the
family doctor and dentist. It is also the time for them to discover the
librarian in the public library.
Equally important, children need friends their own age in these years.
Accommodating children’s increasingly strong social drives is one of the
values of a good childcare center for children whose parents both work,
or who are from one-parent homes, and it’s one of the reasons for
nursery schools. Parents can also satisfy their children’s yearning for
companionship through informal play groups, taking turns with friends
and neighbors in providing supervision while two or three children play
together. Some invite their children’s friends for lunch or to join the
family on a short trip, or simply to come to the house to play.
Preschoolers are in an in-between age, not totally dependent, not
totally independent— a mixture of both, sometimes all in a few
minutes. It is easy to overestimate what these children can do and to
expect too much. It is also easy to underestimate them and to open up
too little physical challenge and too little social and intellectual
stimulation. Parents’ best safeguard and guide is to keep a watchful eye
on their children, to judge from their behavior how they are feeling at
the moment—big and brave and bold, or like little babies—and to
enjoy the children just the way they are.
