In our daily lives, we build an understanding of our environment and of ourselves through our experiences, from an early age. To be able to plan actions, get us moving, learn… our brain relies on the interactions of our body with our environment.
From an early age, the baby develops knowledge of his body and, gradually, his motor skills become more and more voluntary and controlled. The development of his motor skills will allow him little by little to expand his sensory-motor explorations and thus nourish his interactions with his environment. These sensory, motor and emotional experiences, among others, will be a prerequisite for his psychomotor, cognitive and social development.
We measure the huge role played by parents, and all the people who take care of the child, in the interactions they will be able to allow with the outside world. The maturing child's brain will feed and soak up the environment it is offered. These daily experiences will feed their social and emotional (expression of emotions, empathy) and cognitive (manipulation, language, memorization, reasoning, planning, inhibiting, etc.) skills.
Did you know ?
Parental support in the child's discoveries, in his sensory-motor explorations, in games will allow him to develop new knowledge about the world around him. This will allow him, among other things, to put words to what he experiences, but also to explore his environment freely and safely (knowledge of objects, evaluation of shapes, weights, textures, emotions that are linked to them, etc.).
As the child develops, he will be able to anticipate some of his actions, test many strategies to find the one that suits him and which is best suited to the action he is trying to achieve.
The development of the cognitive system is therefore closely linked to psychomotor development , the maturation of the nervous system and emotions, but also the social relationships and interactions that the child weaves with his environment.
In practice, at home
- It is important to take into account the personal aptitudes of the child, to observe him in his development and in his sensory-motor discoveries.
- Offer him opportunities to explore, to repeat experiences in order to arouse his curiosity in the discovery of his environment
- Give him the opportunity to experiment, to make mistakes, to find new ways of doing things. The adult will thus be able to accompany the child so that he finds ways to achieve this on his own, to help him become aware of his successes and his discoveries.
- Verbalize with him what you observe, the emotions that this can create: thus the adult helps the child to discover what he is doing, to warn him of what is going to happen or what we are doing and the child will therefore be able to anticipate events more.
Thus, all the interactions of the child with his environment, the adults who accompany him, the children with whom he plays, the games and the situations he experiences will considerably enlarge his field of exploration and therefore of knowledge. of the world around him.