It’s necessary to promote the mental development of your children, which makes it essential to know ways to build your infant child’s problem-solving skills.
The early years of your children create the foundation for their future development, making it a critical point in their lives. To prepare them for future success, you need to take the time when they’re still young to foster their problem-solving abilities. Know some fun ways to build your infant’s problem-solving skills without it seeming like work.
Playing Peek-a-Boo
During the 12- to 18-month range, the concept of object permanence starts to solidify in your child’s mind. This means they now understand that items out of view still exist; they don’t just disappear. One of the classic ways to reinforce this concept is with the occasional game of peek-a-boo, hiding your face and surprising your child.
Eventually, they’ll catch on to the game and start looking for you behind your fingers, discovering your hiding spot. This is the most basic way to develop your child’s problem-solving skills, but it gets them thinking about how to interact with objects and investigate strange happenings, such as a disappearing face.
Building Blocks
From 3 to 4 years, you should let them play with all manner of building blocks, letting them experiment with different shapes and what makes structures fall over. Give them a supply of connecting blocks and let them find new and creative ways to stack them and make structures. Over time, they’ll learn what works and what won’t, instinctually learning that certain buildings will topple over.
Giving them blocks that have pre-designed instructions can also help guide their endeavors, as well as giving them a chance to read and decipher directions. Learning to comprehend instructions is just as important as learning from experience.
Puzzles
Similar to building blocks but with a critical difference, there is only one way to assemble a puzzle. Giving your child a simple puzzle to observe and figure out puts their problem-solving skills to the test; they need to match up matching pieces and make sure the picture forms the complete whole.
It may be frustrating for them at first, as building blocks are a more free-form construction, but they need to learn to construct it without instructions. Eventually, they’ll become more proficient at recognizing patterns and realizing whether certain pieces and colors will match together without having to force them together.
Let Them Learn on Their Own
It’s sometimes necessary to lend a guiding hand to your children, to offer assistance when they struggle, but sometimes it’s best to take a step back. Knowing ways to build your infant’s problem-solving abilities means letting them try, fail and succeed on their own; if you end up doing everything for them, they’ll never learn.