School Journal | Log 8| Independence, Self Care & Safety (Before School)

In log 1 I had listed out 7 key skills that children seem to pick up during their first 5–6 years. In the next few logs I explored some of these skills:

• log 2 — motor skills
• log 3 — language skills
• log 4 — cognitive skills
• log 5 — creativity & imagination
• log 6 — social & emotional skills
• log 7— basic worldly concepts

Now I shall attempt to understand another vague topic of learning, independence, self care and safety, as children learn them in the first 5–6 years of their life.

Before I embark on this topic, my initial instinct is that this is probably where there will be maximum variation in before school learning. While every other topic had a sort of checklist of skills and milestones, this one might not. There will probably be some basic checklist items at least on the front of independence and self care. However, I expect that some children are significantly more independent than others by the time they reach school going age. I also believe this might be one of those topics where parenting style plays a large role, and its tough to say what is desirable.

With that idea logged, I once again started with a generic question, “how do children develop independence, self care and safety”. Once again, Google returned a bunch of links, but no AI generated answer. Perhaps the AI labs are getting more cautious of offering advice on raising children. So, I went straight to Gemini to ask the same question as a starting point.

Once again, Gemini has not only given me a nicely illustrative answer, but has also provided me with a starting framework. I think that the first sentence, slightly paraphrased provides me with a 2 part framework. Children seem to develop independence, the ability to self care and an instinct for safety when they are given:

• Opportunity — As with all other skills, children need to be given the opportunity to learn them. Here, even more so than with other skills, simple exposure isn’t enough. While it is a starting point, providing children with repeated opportunity do tasks on their own is the cornerstone of developing independence. Without giving children the opportunity (and maybe even the expectation) of doing certain tasks on their own, they might learn how to do the tasks, but may remain dependent on parents and guardians.
• Guidance — The second half of all learning is feedback. The specific benefit of guidance here goes beyond feedback for learning. Close guidance enables breaking up tasks into smaller parts, which makes it possible to give children more opportunity and sooner. This of course enables independence and their very ability to learn things in a self driven manner.

This framework sounds nice enough to me. But to test out whether it holds, I will read through the top few articles from my Google search and compare what I learn. The top few articles from which I picked up some information from were:

• UCF teaching academy document
• Child development .com.au article
• Parents .com article
• Child mind .org article

The key points on how children learn independence, self care and safety continues to fit in the 2 part framework. In addition to that, the above articles provided some interesting information about independence and self care and the process of developing the same.

Importance

The process of developing independence and the ability to self care benefits other types of development. This is quite reasonable since independent activities inherently require a good degree of cognitive development to remember, sequence and plan actions. They of course require motor skills to carry out actions independently.

In addition to skill development, this independence and self care capability are critical to being able to participate in school and most key experiences in the next phase of life.

Building blocks / prerequisites

While a clear timeline is difficult to establish for independent action in any activity, there are some building blocks which enable independence. Thus, developing these building blocks provides a sort of timeline for readiness to develop increasing independence.

• Motor skills— Hand & finger strength, hand control, object manipulation
• Language skills — Reception & understanding of communication, expression & ability to communicate help required
• Cognitive skills— Ability to plan, sequence, remember and understand
• Social & emotional skills— Compliance with instructions

Framework for developing independence

The articles largely listed out activities and ideas to promote development of independence and self care capability which fit neatly into our framework of opportunity and guidance.

Opportunity

• Environment — Creating a conducive environment could include actions like ensuring accessibility of objects (at child’s level), breaking up of tasks into more manageable chunks for children to attempt
• Caregivers —Keeping other caregivers (grand parents, nursery teachers) in the know of what sort of tasks you are trying to build up independence within
• Time & consistency — Allowing enough time to try and learn actions independently before assisting, and creating a routine to make it easier for children to get used to activities they are expected to perform
• Authenticity — While breaking up tasks to a child’s level is useful, actual involvement in actual tasks provides the best and most frequent opportunity

Guidance

• Role model — Consistently across skills, one of the most useful actions seems to be describing what you’re doing, and splitting up tasks to do it along with children
• Visual cues — Creating and putting up visuals may help by acting as reminders for self care tasks and providing guidance on the steps
• Incentives — Reward charts and any other mechanism which provides children a reason to desire independence (only in rare cases where they don’t gravitate towards this on their own)
• Assistance — It is important to provide help, but only after waiting and giving opportunity to process instructions / remember. Similarly, it is important to avoid over-correcting, and to allow children to watch and learn from you (without making them feel like they’re doing things very incorrectly)

Key Activities

There seem to a be a few activities which more often than others are very useful canvases to develop independence and are the bedrock of self care. The ones mentioned across articles are:

• Dressing oneself
• Eating and the act of feeding oneself
• Hygiene and bathing
• Toilet training
• Responsibility (cleaning up, taking care of belongings, helping with chores)

Once again, at my age, it probably won’t be very useful for me to try to emulate the above mentioned methods to develop independence, ability to self care and awareness of safety. And so, I shall now try to synthesise what I have learnt about the skills that children develop before school. Once that mental model has been clearly built in my mind, I will be ready to embark on the journey of running through the average school curriculum and some more.