What should a 4 year old know? He should know that he is always loved completely and unconditionally
I was recently on a school parent online bulletin board was reading a message from a mom who was concerned that her 4 1/2 year old son didn’t know enough. She wrote this, “What should a 4 year old know?”
Most of the responses made me not only feel sad, but quite annoyed. One mom listed a long list of things her son could do. For example, he can count to 100, understand the planets, write his own name, and so on. Other parents also left comments echoing the fact that their kids know a lot too, some as young as three. A few even posted links to related web pages about what they should be able to do at what age, and so on. Only a few said that each child’s developmental progress was different and not to worry too much.
These responses bothered me a lot. They gave the worried mother a list of all the things her child would not be able to do. We live in such a competitive culture that even our preschoolers are already chasing trophies and bragging rights. Childhood should not be a race.
So, I’m offering here what I think a 4-year-old should know.
She should know that she is always loved completely and unconditionally.
He should know that he is safe and he should know how to keep himself safe in public, with others and in unexpected situations. He should know who he can trust and that he can refrain from doing something if he thinks it’s wrong, no matter who tells him to do it. He should know his personal rights and know that his family will support him unconditionally.
She should know how to laugh, how to make a scene, how to be weird and use her imagination. She should know that even painting the sky orange and painting a cat with six legs is okay.
He should know his interests and be encouraged to develop them. If he’s not too interested in learning math, then his parents should realize that he can learn it in the near future, so why not let him just immerse himself in the world of rocket ships, painting, dinosaurs and playing in the mud.
She should know how amazing the world is, and she does. She should know how wonderful, splendid, creative, life-loving, compassionate, and fantastic she is. She should know that spending a whole day outdoors making wreaths and mud pies and building fairy houses is more worthwhile, very worthwhile, than practicing spelling.
More importantly, parents need to know something.
Every child learns to walk, talk, read and do math at his/her own pace, and it has little to do with how well he/she learns in the future.
The best thing you can do to give your child high academic credit in the future is to read to him/her. Not study cards, not exercise books, not how fancy the kindergarten is, not shiny toys or computers, but parents sitting down and reading wonderful books to them every morning or evening (or both).
Being the smartest and most accomplished child in the class is not necessarily the happiest. We want to offer our children help, but instead we allow them to get caught up in the same vortex of a busy and stressful life that we do. The greatest support we can offer them is to give them a simple and carefree childhood.
Our children should be surrounded by books, nature, artwork and exploration. Most of us can try to give up 90% of the toys that our children don’t miss. But some things are important: assembly toys like Legos and building blocks, creative toys like a variety of arts and crafts materials (great), musical instruments (real and diverse), costumes to play characters and a variety of books, yes books, or books.
They should also be free to explore the following things: they can sit in the kid’s chair and play with beans while we prepare dinner (with adult supervision, of course); he can knead bread and make a mess with a little spatula and play with dough on the kitchen table with a brush, even if it gets everywhere. Leave them an area in the backyard where they can dig up the grass and dig up the ground as much as they want.
Our kids need more of us. We have become very good at saying that we need to take care of ourselves more, even using that as an excuse to let others take care of our children. Even though we all need privacy, to gather with friends, to take productive breaks, to let go of parenthood once in a while. But our children need their fathers to sit down and listen to them, their mothers to do crafts with them, and us to tell them stories and be silly with them. They need us to walk with them on spring nights, even when they’re just toddlers. They are perfectly capable of preparing dinner with us, even if it takes twice as long to finish.
They should know that they will always be first in our hearts and that we truly love spending quality time with them.
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