The Burdened Pre-school Child

The pre-school period is considered the age between 3-6 years, the child at this age grows beyond being a baby and passes through one of the most difficult and life altering phase of his developmental journey, for his emotional interest shifts beyond his family to playmates at school and world at large. This shift is critical to any child's developing independence and maturity. The emotional trauma and stress at this period has its impact for a long time to come.
Developmental specialists call this as the OEDIPAL PHASE, mainly because it develops the romantic feeling about the parent of the opposite sex along with competitive feelings towards the same sex parent. In the phase child gains an appreciation and acceptance of himself and herself as boy or girl. Thus achieving a firm sense of sexual identity.
The various streams of developmental activities for a pre-schooler is as follows.

Physical Activity
Sitting still is an conscious effort on the child. This is an energy consuming activity, they get tired if they have to sit and listen to a teacher talk than if they were allowed to move about. The frontal lobe of the brain which controls the natural energy and curiosity is still immature. This neurological processs is not ready to take this stress easily.

Language Development
Experts say that language development should not be broken down to isolated skills, reading, writing and speaking. Children learn to reason and express themselves by talking. They can dictate stories before they can actually read and write. Their composition need not be perfect in grammar but they must learn to communicate.

Abilities and Limitations
Symbolic thinking as dramatic play and representational drawing makes its appearance. His thinking is egocentric, therefore he cannot appreciate that nd these persons can think differently.

His limitation is he cannot take into account more than one feature of a situation at a time.
Next limitation is that he cannot understand cause and effect, therefore any two events that coincide may have some casual connection. (Ex. Mother says it will rain a short while from now [She might have heard the weather forecast] but to the child it is because his mother said so.)

Animism
Another feature at this age is thinking all animate and inanimate have human feelings, human purpose and motivation.

Recollect your child saying "Don't beat the doll it will hurt her". In his play the child's fantasy is uppermost, he/she is not yet ready to accomodate the harsh demands of reality (Important point for our teachers who teach facts and figures at this age). In fact the child can change the situation by imagining himself to be different from being an engine driver to a doctor and favorite role play of a child is teacher (with a stick in hand). It is towards the end of five years that he draws a line between make believe and reality.

Thus a 3-year old is generally interested in doing things for themselves, their ability to listen to stories and music is limited. You can teach them few things by doing, not to write and read.
4-year olds do better on fine mother skills as cutting, painting, master color, shapes, allow them to scribble, can pen circular, transformation letters as CEQQ and few angular as EHTLP, can point to objects, understands equal, less and more, oral counting will be faster but it makes no sense to them.

4--5 year olds learn best by interacting with people and concentrate on objects and by trying to solve problem. They can learn from stories and books, but in only ways that relate to their own experience. They can play in groups not organized games.

Three very important points for all of us to remember is in SOCIALIZATION. That an youngster's social development has profound effect on his academic program. Children who have trouble getting along with their classmates can end up behind in studies and higher incidence of drop outs. Therefore in early schooling children should be encouraged to work in groups rather than individually, so that the teacher can spot the child with problems in making friends. In groups children learn to work together, to diagree, too specialise, to take them and above all to decelerate tension. This cannot be learned by lecture.

Competence and Self esteem
These children are struggling to meet the adult's expectations. They don't know how to distinguish between effects and ability, therefore if they try hard and fail they feel that they can never achieve a particular task. At this age (around 5--6 years) the children are learning to judge themselves in relation to others. The effect of obvious methods of comparison as posting reports can be serious. A child who has had his confidence damaged needs rescue operation.

Rate of Growth
There is a wide range of development for children with normal intelligence at this age. A child's pace is impossible to predict before hand Some kids learn to read on their own, others are still trying to decide words. But the fourth standard, most of them even cut, some time there are spurts in learning like growth spurts (suddenly growing tall), a child who is behind all year catch upon a few words.

The back to basic movement that meant teaching methods intended for high school are imposed on these young children by giving homework, text, discipline, drilling knowledge with demanding parents, do not understand that even at 5 years children are not ready for these. Most of the academic test came easily to older children no matter how many years of school they have completed. We are confusing number of years in the school with brain development, just because a child goes to school at the age of three does not mean human brain matures with a older brain. At three years brain is still a 3-year old brain.

In this very atmosphere so domineering that the CHILD'S SENSE OF SECURITY IS WEAKENED. The impact of these is shown by the tension outlet in these children.
You may be shocked to know information gathered on 102 children: Refusal to eat, thumb sucking, stuttering, temper tantrum, verbal abuses, restlessness, spitting, facial grimaces, vomitting, bed-wetting, were seen in 70% of cases with no apparent organic disease.
Unfortunately clinicians not familiar with these problems, due to stress, load these children with medicines for pain, asthma, etc over a long time. This results in the child having to take another trauma of swallowing pills with no relief to his problems and having to suffer the side effects of these drugs as well.

So unfortunate is our situation that only calamities like earthquake or floods attract the attention of decision makers. The slow mental agony of millions of our children has no importance. In the book "Mis-Education" David Elkind say's that during this critical period the sense of competence is frequently under attack not only from the INAPPROPRIATE INSTRUCTIONAL practice but from feeling of hurt, frustrations and rejection. Adults can under similar stress rationalise set back, put them on perspective based on previous experience. Young children have none of these defenses.

Schools that demand too much, too soon are setting kids on the road to failure. No wonder we have such poor results in our high school. A country of over one billion people produce a handful of professors and scientists. The youth would rather get a seat by paying donation or passing an examination, where reading rooms and libraries are not places to visit with so many universities we have so little research resulting in killing of creativity at a young age.
The public attention is usually focussed on older children and universities. That a bandaid kind of approach--when a product does not come out right fixing it in the end does not work. We have to start from the beginning.

My strong plea to this group is to humanise school education and counteract tendencies towards regimentation, this needs looking beyond test scores and report cards. You cannot put 3--6 years olds in front of a desk and drill them all day. Education which is developmentally appropriate is the need of the hour. Parent involvement is important to bring about change especially when a school changes over the traditional practices.

A successful child centred classroom can function effortlessly even in the existing scenario provided a lot of planning is alive.

What are the parameters for judgement beside report card, etc. Remember children at this stage are not even tested for IQ. We only believe in developmental quotient which has a very poor co-relation to IQ. If that be so, are all these efforts productive? Should you give allowance to the nervous system to grow by stages and sequences which cannot be altered as yet. It is not number of years in school that is important but at what stage the child is subjected to learn keeping development in mind.

Most teachers and parents fail to understand the child's behavioural problem arise from these conflicting attitudes.

Author: Ms. Meenakshi Sivaramakrishnan