Paper craft to a new level!

The department where I work has recently been on a path to popularise paper craft to parents in order to make it as a simple way to make toys and visually attractive designs to hang as mobiles for children. 

It took a new turn with every child visiting us going home with a design which Shantha has made during her free time! She found immense encouragement from her colleagues in this new step to get parents to think about to creating a Children's Corner at home. 

We presented to parents the idea of creating a Children's Corner at home through a video we uploaded in the U Tube  few months ago. We feel that only about ten percent families have a dedicated corner for children at home. Many families do have space and wherewithal to create one, but do not attempt to present it as a gift to their children. 

One of the experiences we find in the department is that the mobile phones occupy a prime place in the life of a child even from six months. Parents replace singing, talking and playing with children by offering unlimited time with mobile phones by exposing them to the cartoons, games, and even movies. Some parents convince themselves against any scientific evidence  that children pick up English better through this exposure.

What children need in the first two years of their lives is to grow in attachment behaviour towards care givers which is the first step towards developing emotional bonding with parents. Only when a child has that secure feeling of belonging and bonding, that child can progress in cognitive and communication skills. The intent to communicate or socialise springs from growing in an interactive environment, not when children are made to be passive visual entertainment. 

The down side of screen time is that children see colours, actions, movements and animation that they ignore the audio component of those presentations. There is a significant deficit in language spoken to children when children get occupied with mobile phones or TV viewing. 

Only if they hear the human voice and can observe how sounds are produced by a human face can they ever associate that with a meaning when heard and processed. The semantics, pragmatics and prosody of the language become familiar to children when human voices are heard frequently. Reading books with pictures and acting out story lines make children develop the idea of social communication. The nursery rhymes and actions songs create another level of language exchange with integrated understanding by hearing, seeing and acting out! 

I wish our view of children as co-learners with us would get prime attention! We come across children with Developmental Language Disorder because of under exposure to human interaction and overexposure to the screes of the electronic media. The aggressiveness soem children show in behaviour are imitations of what they watch in tent screen. To reduce meal times to be screen time associated feeding is another disservice we offer to children. Food is not for nutrition alone; meal times are more promoting communication and interaction. 

Let su return to children's childhood by being fully available! They become in future through what we unto them, when they are in the first five years of their lives. 

M.C.Mathew(text and photo)