How to Find and Nurture your Child’s Strengths

Parenthood is a challenge in letting go, especially for mothers, and I know this from experience.  We carry our child in the womb for nine months, give birth to and care for it, hoping and praying all goes well.  After all the sweat and hard labor, we then muster the courage to send our little treasure to his or her first social circle: the preschool.  This becomes our first lesson in handling separation anxiety.

However, before we do embark on this bittersweet journey, we, as parents, should try our best to equip our child emotionally.  We do this by finding and nurturing their respective strengths and gifts.  Luckily, these “inner strengths” develop early in life, enabling us to detect them firsthand.  Helping them discover these attributes is one of the best gifts we could possibly bestow upon our children.  Here are a few ways to find our children’s strengths and nurture them:

 

Stop, look, and listen.  Parents are the best observers.   Coupled with the trained eye of a teacher, we can take note of what our child is truly interested in.

After a few weeks in preschool, take time to ask the teachers what your child likes doing. Rather than planning his future this early (“I want my child to attend Harvard”), look at what he appears to be enjoying now instead. Watch what he likes playing with, whether he likes playing alone or with others.  Does he like animals?  Does he like stacking up wooden blocks or (God forbid) climbing furniture?  Does he play endlessly with puzzles or use the crayons passionately?  

Listen to his first few sentences.  Usually they give us pictures of his interests.   Also, tune in to what he fancies listening to:  a certain instrument, musical tunes, or your singing.  Don’t fall into the trap of trying to fill in his ears instead of listening TOGETHER with him.

 

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Write it down. Another helpful hint is writing down what you observe. The human brain has limited storage capacity, which accounts for why we don’t always remember everything we see (or do).  Putting things on paper is a great memory aid. Taking notes can be very helpful in identifying and further developing his / her gifts or working on the weaknesses.

While living in Europe years ago, I meticulously documented my daughter’s babblings and noticed that she used different words to describe one object.  She garbled a lot of her letters and mixed Tagalog with English and Spanish. I later discovered that she was trying to make sense of the languages she was hearing around her, simply because our own mother tongue was obviously distinct.  My husband and I always had a difficult time understanding her, and perhaps that made her resort to just pointing to objects instead of using words.  We then made a decision based on our observations: each parent would speak a particular language and would have to stick to it.  She learned the vernacular outside the home, particularly in school.

Having closely listened and taken notes helped us tap into our daughter’s difficulty and turn it into an advantage.  She is now fluent in three languages, and seems to have a gift for learning more.  She is currently learning a fourth language, and another Filipino dialect.

 

Get down and dirty. When was the last (or first) time you actually got down on your hands, knees and bums to play with your child?  Have you helped her make a tower using wooden blocks?  Did you “taste” the coffee she “made” with her tea set?  Have you noticed that your son likes using the color red when he paints?  

Taking time to play with your precious preschooler teaches him that you value his work and appreciate the effort he has put into his masterpiece. You may also discover that he has a talent for the visual arts, or is spatially gifted and may become interested in the workings of physics and building.  

He may be inclined to tinkering and using his hands as he consistently succeeds at putting a puzzle together.  Your future little “master” chef could be the next Philippine sensation because you observed he has a penchant for mixing ingredients and is curious about the taste of food.  All this by simply learning to play with him!

 

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Celebrate her uniqueness.  In the years of being a teacher here and in other countries, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed making “Me Walls” for the children.    As each child is different and unique, we make sure he/she knows how special she is. In the past, we’ve encouraged the parents to send photos, favorite items, drawings or artwork, and even pieces of clothing to school.  

With the child’s help, we put together a “Me Wall” containing all sorts of knicks and knacks stuck to the wall (or door, whichever works better).  The child’s photos—as a baby and the current picture—are in the middle of the poster, of course.  Each day, he adds a particular item which identifies and differentiates himself from the others.

We’ve done this activity with each of my children and to this day, I’ve kept their posters hanging on their walls.  They smile at their photos and at their handiwork.  And I am happy at the thought that they like looking back at how they were and what we did together.

 

Nurture.  The dictionary defines it as “to support and encourage; train and educate.”  All words are quite heavy to digest in one go so let us make them easier to take in.  The task of parents, among others, is first, to help children discover their gifts.  Once those are out in the open, finding ways to “nurture” them is the easier job.

To nurture is to support and develop. With the advent of new technology, various academic enhancement classes, and extra-curricular activities, we parents literally just have to “point and click” as to which classes to enroll our children in. Once we’ve figured out what strengths and interests our children have, we can just pick up the phone, or use the mouse, to schedule his or her lessons or single our the school best for him.  

Visit the school (or center), talk with the teachers and staff, and try to time it with a “sit-in” or observation session.  

That’s the easy part - what’s difficult is letting go.  As we go through the rituals of preparing for the first day - the clothes she will wear, the mini-backpack, the shoes, the snacks - we also rearrange our own schedules to make certain we are on-hand for those few hours we have with them.  However, because we’ve gone through the beautiful process of discovering our child’s inner gifts and strengths, we are comforted with the thought that even if we are not with her in school, we know that she will be just fine.

 

Aina Lacson earned her Master of Arts degree in Early Childhood Education from the Boston College School of Education in Massachusetts, USA, and taught preschool in Spain, the USA and the Philippines.

Photo from sxc.hu