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Naperville
Friday, March 29, 2024

Raise Your Play IQ – Cultivating kindness

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by Alix Tonsgard

Anyone who works with or has young children knows that they are driven by an innate need to understand how the world operates. Noticing and being interested in differences is one manifestation of this drive to learn. These differences can pertain to objects and surroundings but also to people from a physical and/or emotional standpoint.

A topic that has been at the forefront of my mind is that of teaching kindness, empathy, and an appreciation for individual differences. The research regarding child development is clear – that the experiences a child has in the early years of their life are formative and lay the foundation for later development. This holds true as much for social-emotional development as it does for cognitive development. These early childhood interactions and experiences are the building blocks for developing the skills necessary to form healthy friendships as well as prevent aggressive behaviors that could later manifest as bullying.

The settings that young children are immersed in, ranging from daycare to library story times, and even informal learning environments such as DuPage Childen’s Museum, are often a child’s first context outside of the home where they have opportunities to learn to relate to and interact with their peers. When the Museum is designing experiences (both programs and exhibits), we are not only thinking of ways to support learning of things that are content specific, but also how best to support growth and development from a holistic perspective which includes social-emotional development.

The Museum presents parents with an excellent setting to support children as they interact with others and help children learn to problem solve social situations and constructively express their feelings, which has the potential to prevent future bullying.

For some ways to support your child’s social and emotional development read my full blog at dupagechildrens.org/blog or visit stopbullying.gov.

Alix Tonsgard is an early learning specialist at the DuPage Children’s Museum.

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DuPage Children's Museum
DuPage Children's Museumhttp://dupagechildrens.org/
The DuPage Children’s Museum’s mission is to stimulate curiosity, creativity, thinking and problem solving in young children through self-directed, open-ended experiences; integration of the arts, science and math; the child-adult learning partnership.

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