Educating a child also means leaving him time to discover that the error is essential to learn: to achieve this goal it is necessary to put aside the fear that it hurts and avoid correcting him even before he realizes what he is doing
Giovanni is trying to go down the steps alone, his father notices and, with his heart in his throat, making a leap forward, approaches and says: “Do you want to go down? It’s dangerous, I bring you. ” Then the parent takes the baby in his arms and takes him to the lower floor. Shortly thereafter, Giovanni tries to get on an obstacle that he found along his journey, but promptly the adult takes him by the hand and moves the difficulty away … and with it, however, also the way to autonomy. When the child approaches the scale, in fact, the task of the parent would be to help him go down, showing him how to do not hurt himself (and the same thing applies to similar situations): you can get off the seated or backwards, with the parent on your side who plays the role of the “safety adult”.
Help me do it yourself
“An effective pedagogical action on tender children must be to help them advance on the ways of independence so understood, which consists in starting the first forms of activity enough to themselves and not weigh on others for their inability”, writes Maria Montessori. “Help them learn to walk without help, run, to jump and go down the stairs, to raise fallen objects, to speak to clearly express their needs, to try with attempts to meet their desires, here is the education of independence”. The concept of autonomy, so dear to Montessori, is explicit in the expression “help me do it alone”in which “help me” does not mean “replacing me” but, rather, “I need to know that you are next to me, because alone I cannot educate myself; Education is a dialogue, but help me do it alone, because nobody can learn in my place ».
From concrete to abstract
What are the steps that allow a child to learn to do things? The neurobiologist and author of Evidence NetworkAlberto Oliverio writes: “The structure of the cerebral circuits depends (…) also on the experiences we have starting from early childhood: a careful stimulation can induce changes to the function and the same nervous structure”. So Leaving things helps the development of skills while preventing or anticipating it precludes it. The same author adds: “It is through observation and motor action that a child realizes a series of concrete learning which gradually will transform into abstract concepts”. To find out, know and learn a child needs to touch, to explore, to do. And all these activities necessarily pass through movement, which will be safer from time to time if the child will have the opportunity to make mistakes and learn, discovering himself and the world.
Make mistakes and retry
Let’s make another example: Giovanni tries to pour a glass of water; He saw him doing many times from his parents and now he wants to try. For an adult it is easy to see the epilogue of this action. Here, therefore, that the parent immediately is ready to correct it, preventing the child from experimenting alone.
First of all, the little one, who has not yet finished performing his attempt, does not understand where the problem is: the words that accompany the correction are useless, because the child has not completed his action and does not know what he is talking about. Furthermore, the attitude of the adult, which in most cases is reproaching, puts him in a position to think that what he was doing should not be redone or, above all, reserved. So we removed from the child’s mind a stimulus that could have been important. If this educational action is repeated for everything, the message that comes to the child is that it is better not to try to do anything: here is compromised the exploration of the world and consequently autonomy.
How to intervene
While Giovanni tried to pour the water, the parent should have approached and show him the action saying: «Take the bottle with two hands, raise it slowly, approach it to the glass and try to pour. Look at the glass to raise the bottle before it is full ». In this way he would have given John the opportunity to do himself, knowing he could be helped in the moment of need. If then Giovanni had poured the water on the table, the parent could have made himself useful by leaving him a sponge and making him dry that small mistake, without giving the idea of an irremediable trouble but only of something to be more careful the next time.
The Pedagogist Montessoriana and author of Evidence NetworkAnnalisa Perino, in her book Here a child liveshe writes: “Unfortunately, children sometimes make a mistake, place, moment, and what wanted to be a good action turns, into the eyes of the adult, into a disaster”. An adult who is educating should also predispose to teach also and above all to correct any errors without falling into the vortex of reproaches which, in turn, trigger the chain of irritability and what is improperly called “whim”. In reality, the whim is a way in which the child communicates that he does not understand or not to be understood.
If John’s parent, instead of leaving the sponge to dry the water, had spatient himself and had said “Here, you have combined a disaster, now I have to clean!”, The child would have likely to cry, he would have been disappointed and angry, instead of trying satisfaction for having done a new thing and having also been able to make a correction.
Learn for yourself
Let’s try to think of Giovanni at the beginning of the elementary school, while during homework he carries out his first additions. The baby begins to write the result with the pencil, and the parent realizes, even before the number is written in full, that the result is wrong. The hand of the parent immediately erases the written half number with the rubber, Giovanni raises his head, his expression seems to say: “What did I do? I haven’t finished writing yet, why Gelle? ».
If, on the other hand, the parent waited for the end of the exercise and suggests Giovanni to control the result, Giovanni would discover his mistake by himself and correct him: the The task of the parent who educates is to be there, show things, show how they do and possibly how they correct themselves. Nobody was born knowing everything well, and only by allowing the child to try – and try again once again – we will see him satisfied that he has learned alone.
