5 Ways to Grow Your Child’s Curiosity
Plato, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, Thomas Edison, and Benjamin Franklin are names that fill history books with the huge impact that they had in shaping the world into what it is today. What you may not realize though is that your child has one of the most important qualities behind their success in common, curiosity. Each and every great advancement starts with somebody asking why something is the way it is, just like your kid often does from the backseat of the car.
As a parent, we want what is best for our kids and for them to have their most successful life possible, and making sure that they grow up in an environment that encourages their curiosity is very important in setting them up for success. Without growing their budding curiosity at a young age, it will begin to diminish as they get older and they will start just accepting that things around them are the way that they are. While there are many ways to create this environment we have identified the following five strategies that help keep curiosity at the center of your child’s life.
- Make Their World Seem Endless: When your child first comes into the world the possibilities seem endless. There are sounds that they have never heard, sights that they have never seen, and feelings that they have never felt. At this age everything is new and they keep asking questions and pushing boundaries. However, as they begin to get older and the questions begin to be answered they begin to feel more comfortable with the world and it begins to shrink. In order to combat this and keep them questioning things, you must constantly keep expanding their horizons. Show them new places, introduce them to new cultures and thought processes, or talk to experts in various fields allowing them to learn more about different professions. This does not have to even be expensive, as you can introduce them to any of these topics through books or a story you find on the internet for them. You can also try to set a big goal that takes years or even decades to accomplish that makes their world seem even larger, such as visiting all the national parks.
- Encourage Numerous Questions: Odds are that at some point you have been frustrated at the fact that every time you answer a question, you immediately get a follow-up question from you child asking you why the answer is the way that it is. What you may not realize is that this same series of why’s is used at Toyota every day and has been instrumental in their success. The 5 Why’s Technique employed at Toyota is based on the thought that to get to the real root of the problem you must ask why multiple times. While kids often use this technique without even realizing it, it begins to quickly subside as they get older hurting both their curiosity and problem-solving abilities. In order to encourage this behavior, you should be sure to ask constant follow-up questions. For instance if they ask why their toy charges when it is plugged in, you may answer because it gets power from the outlet. Then even if they seem satisfied with that answer you follow up their question asking them why it gets power from the outlet. After answering that question for them you can then continue this back and forth seeing how many questions you can string together. By doing this you encourage them to continue doing this for themselves.
- Learn Together: By using the previous strategy you will undoubtedly start to run into questions that you do not know the answer to. Luckily, one advantage that you have over your parents when you were growing up is the endless amounts of information that you have at your fingertips. While you could instantly look these answers up yourself, you can also take this opportunity to teach your child how to follow their own curiosity. By looking up the question together, you help lead them through the entire process from how to look up their question to what sources can be trusted. This will benefit them in every aspect of their life from school to personal.
- Keep Notes on Curiosities: One big difference between curiosity of successful people and the curiosity of those that aren’t as successful is that they keep revisiting their curiosities. In order to encourage this quality in your child, you should keep notes on topics that they seem to ask a lot of questions about. These topics can then be brought back up during playtime weeks later and even be encouraged to be incorporated into their playtime. For instance, if they were to be asking questions about what the flu is, you could tell them that a doll has the flu and that they need to help cure it. This helps your child think on the topic further, raise new questions, and teaches them to examine topics thoroughly.
- Read During the Day: The most common time for a parent to read to their kids is at night right before they go to bed. While any time a child is read to or opens a book has long term positive effects, night time reading is not the most beneficial for encouraging their curiosity. When reading with your child earlier in the day you are not worried about trying to get them to relax and fall asleep, but rather you can get them fully engaged and excited about the story. This includes actively asking them questions about what they think might happen on the next page, or what if something different happened like if the princess never kissed the frog. Another possibility is to read the book with them making them one of the characters in the story and have them play out their part. This immerses your child even more in the books they are reading. This active reading will continue to be important for them as they grow older as they actively question everything they read in every textbook.
Your child’s curiosity will affect the rest of their life and play a critical role in defining who they are. Without an intense curiosity, they run the risk of never finding out what they are truly passionate about, and it could significantly hinder their success. You as a parent play a critical role in creating an environment that encourages and expands their curiosity so that it will stick for the rest of their lives.
What strategies have you tried to help encourage your kids curiosity?
Posted on July 25, 2017 Eric Farell
Originally published at www.apartofthestory.com on July 25, 2017.
