How You Can Encourage Your Child’s Love of Learning
We all want our children to grow into successful adults, and most parents view education as the way to get there. However, by the end of high school, 75% of students feel negatively about their learning experience, saying they’re bored, tired or stressed out.
At some point, kids go from preschoolers who soak up learning like a sponge to burnt-out and disinterested teenagers. What can you do right now to help keep your child’s love of learning alive?
1. Explore Their Interests
Do you enjoy being forced to learn things that don’t interest you? Your kids don’t either. When you give children the opportunity to choose what they learn, they’ll ask more questions and get involved more quickly than if you force them into certain subjects.
Help your child discover where their interests lie. What topics make them feel naturally curious? Expose them to all sorts of experiences like museums, galleries, stage performances, movies, historical sites, nature walks and whatever else you can think of. When your kids find something that speaks to them, you’ll notice. Foster their curiosity by helping them find resources to learn more.
Odds are they won’t just have one area of interest for their entire childhood. Like adults, kids tend to bounce around from thing to thing. When that happens, be prepared to switch gears and help them explore something entirely new.
2. Share Your Passions
One of the best ways to encourage a love of learning is to lead by example. Let your kids see you exploring subjects that fascinate you or mastering new skills. Try taking a class through a university or a self-led online course.
Most importantly, talk to your kids about what you’re learning. Tell them about the book you just read or gush over the documentary you binged while they were out. Show them learning doesn’t end in school, and it can be fun!
Expose your child to your passions and hobbies. If you find common interests, explore them together. Challenge each other to learn new things. Take a trip centered around getting to know your topic better. Ask each other great questions and find the answers together.
3. Read Daily
Reading is such a great way to learn: explore the surface of Mars, search the ocean’s depths, slay a dragon, conquer your fears, experience moments in history, study animal species and so much more from the comfort of your favorite chair.
Encourage a love of reading and learning by practicing what you preach and incorporating a time for reading each day. Kids are always watching and will see you enjoy reading and want to do it themselves. Make sure you frame reading as an enjoyable activity and not something you must mark off your to-do list.
Reading aloud to your kids is a great way to get them going. Once they start learning to read, take turns reading pages to each other. Then when your kids are much older, try setting up a reading time where everyone in the house stops what they’re doing and reads their own book for a while.
As a possible extension, get kids writing whenever possible. Keep a family reading log or encourage your teens to journal about what they’re reading. Writing is linked to improved brain activity and better retention.
4. Make It Fun
Part of the problem with formal schooling is it stops being fun at some point. Math in elementary school uses manipulatives and teaches problems that are easily applicable to daily life. At the high school level, the same subject involves plugging numbers into an equation in a calculator, leaving kids to wonder how they’ll possibly use these skills.
At home, far away from standardized tests, you’re free to make things fun again. Hands-on experiences are typically the most fun and seem less like learning. Doing fun at-home science experiments you find on the internet are way more interesting than taking notes from a book at school.
Playing games, singing, experimenting, going to museums, getting artistic and getting outside all provide opportunities for learning that don’t involve a classroom. Your kids will love the family bonding time and the memories you make.
5. Offer a Safe Environment
Of those high schoolers who felt negatively about their education experience, so many were overwhelmed and stressed out. Kids are loaded down with projects that feel like busy work and are expected to memorize large amounts of information to succeed on standardized tests, which isn’t a friendly environment for learning.
At home, you can remove many of the obstacles that get in the way of fun learning. Give your kids a chance to explore their interests without the fear of failure. Praise your kids for their growth — complimenting the journey instead of the outcome. Fostering a growth mindset for your kids will help them become lifelong learners who enjoy the process rather than resent it.
Anything Can Be a Learning Opportunity
Kids ask dozens of questions each day. Use these as opportunities to teach them something new. If you don’t know the answer, be honest and look it up together. Also, take the time to ask them questions, but avoid asking them to perform — reciting answers to questions you know they can already answer. Instead, ask questions that will get them thinking and wanting to learn more.
