It seems everything you tell them either falls on deaf ears or goes in one ear and out the other. But that’s not how it works.
Toddlers listen, they just store the information for later use, a new study finds.
A team of researchers at the University of Colorado at Boulder used a computer game and a setup that measures the diameter of the pupil of the eye to determine the mental effort of the child to study the cognitive abilities of 3-and-a-half-year-olds and 8-year-olds.
The game involved teaching children simple rules about two cartoon characters – Blue from Blue’s Clues and SpongeBob SquarePants – and their preferences for different objects. The children were told that Blue likes watermelon, so they were to press the happy face on the computer screen only when they saw Blue followed by a watermelon. When SpongeBob appeared, they were to press the sad face on the screen.
The researchers found that older kids found the sequence easy, because they anticipate the answer before the object appears but preschoolers fail to anticipate because they slow down and exert mental effort after being presented with the watermelon, as if they’re thinking back to the character they had seen only after the fact.
“For example, let’s say it’s cold outside and you tell your 3-year-old to go get his jacket out of his bedroom and get ready to go outside,” doctoral student Christopher Chatham explained. “You might expect the child to plan for the future, think ‘OK it’s cold outside so the jacket will keep me warm.’ But what we suggest is that this isn’t what goes on in a 3-year-old’s brain. Rather, they run outside, discover that it is cold, and then retrieve the memory of where their jacket is, and then they go get it.”
It would be more effective to highlight to the child the situation that they are going to face, rather than to repeat the instruction, again and again. In the case of the jacket, say to them that if they don’t want to bring the coat out now but find themselves shivering cold later on, they should go back to get their coats.
Source: LiveScience, 24 March 2009
Chapter: Kids :: 30 March 2009
