How do I get my preschooler interested in learning? Discover 8 simple but effective strategies to overcome your child’s resistance to any learning activity
Hi there! Today, I want to talk to you about a very important topic that you may encounter when you're trying to forge this learning partnership with your child: how to handle resistance to an activity that you might encounter if you're just beginning to incorporate learning activities into your day.
Although it's certainly possible to see resistance at any point in the process, I want to reassure you that by focusing on a few key principles, you'll be able to forge a learning partnership with your child: a cooperative relationship around learning activities that will not completely but greatly reduce resistance to learning activities in the future.
Let’s dive in!
The first thing you want to do is try to identify the reason or reasons behind the resistance. This does not just apply to learning activities; it can also apply to when you ask your child to brush their teeth or anything else. Depending on where it's coming from, that's going to guide what steps you take to overcome it. And overcoming it doesn't always mean that the child peacefully complies. I'll explain all of that in a moment.
When you're dealing with your child’s resistance to an activity, a lot of the time, it is because the proposed activity isn't part of your child's agenda. Your child doesn't necessarily see this activity as relevant or important to them, and it is kind of an interruption to whatever they're engrossed in at the moment.
They may be playing with their favorite toys, or watching their favorite TV show, they may have other ideas about what they want to go and do, and they don't understand why they should stop that and go and focus on this activity that you want them to come and do. So if that's the problem, this is where I talk about the importance of forming a cooperative relationship with your child. It's really quite unfair if you think about it, to ask them to switch gears like that. I mean, we ourselves don't like to be interrupted in the middle of a pleasant activity for us or a favorite activity to be asked to go and do something.
If you were in the middle of your favorite television show, or reading your favorite book, or working on a hobby or a craft that you really enjoy, and then somebody told you you had to go wash the dishes right now, you would probably be a little bit resistant to it. So a big part of meeting resistance and overcoming it is to learn to see the experience from your child's perspective and what's going on, and to pick your timing on these activities.
One thing that really helps with this is developing transitions to give your child a warning that, okay, in five minutes we're going to clean up these toys and we're going to go on to a different activity. It's forecasting what's ahead for them and allowing them to transition between activities. So that's a common way of overcoming this.
Another way is just to learn and work with your child's natural rhythms.
Some children are more inclined to be cooperative or to be ready to do certain things at different times of the day.
As a writer myself, I know that my optimal time for writing is first thing in the morning and that I really need to work with that. If I'm trying to do it late in the day, then I'm not at my best, and I really don't want to do it, and I don't feel like it.
And your children have all of these same patterns and rhythms of what they're up for and when. So this is another part of what I mean by just forming this cooperative relationship with your child is that as you incorporate intentionally more and more of these learning activities, you will also learn your child's natural rhythms and patterns for when they are most up for specific activities and when they're most able to engage.
For example, your child may be really inclined to focus on fine motor skills in the morning and really eager to sit down at the table and do some of those activities in the morning, but towards the end of the day, they may prefer to have a reading time.
We can have the best laid out plans in the world, and it's wise to anticipate that your children aren't necessarily going to share that same plan. So, coming into it with a spirit of expecting that, of being willing to compromise, of changing plans, and of being flexible is just going to make everybody happier.
Another way to accomplish that is to simply work it in. Look at the objective that you're trying to accomplish with the activity.
So, for instance, if it's time for a counting activity and you had initially planned to have your child come to the table and do a worksheet or come into the kitchen and do a kitchen activity with counting. But your child is in the middle of playing with dinosaurs, and that's their favorite thing to do, and they really do not want to come away from that to engage in this activity that you've set up.
Well, the easiest way around that is to incorporate the objective into what they're already doing. Be flexible about how you accomplish the objective.
One of the things we tried to do in the Ready for Kindergarten and Beyond curriculum is to offer a variety of activities throughout the week for an objective, so that you can kind of pick and choose. Maybe one thing will fit into your schedule better on one day, or maybe one thing is simply more appealing to your child on that day. You can be flexible in that way and simply choose a different activity, or come and sit with them on the floor with the dinosaurs and use the dinosaurs as the counting activity.
Or if the objective is that you were going to practice the sound of the letter B, then come and sit with your child with the dinosaurs and come up with names for the dinosaurs that start with a B and practice the sound of the letter B that way.
You're still accomplishing the objective. You're just being flexible about the activity and how you go about it. That is another fantastic way to overcome resistance.
You're not making it a fight.
You're not insisting that your child come and do the exact thing that you had planned at the precise moment that you had planned to do it.
But you're still keeping in mind what the real goal here is. And the real goal is the learning objective and figuring out a creative way to accomplish it.
Another method, if your child is having none of that, is to expand the goal even further and say, okay, well maybe we can't accomplish this objective right now, but we can still accomplish some other objective. We can have some sort of learning time now, even if it's accomplishing a different objective.
For example, let's say it's reading time and your child does not feel like sitting down to listen quietly to a book. Well, then, okay, we're going to go outside and play hopscotch, counting your jumps as you jump them. We're going to let you get your energy out and do something very active since you do not feel like sitting and listening to a book right now, and we're just going to work on counting instead.
And what you're doing there is you're trading objectives to accomplish what's working for your child at that moment, and you're still accomplishing your goal of having a learning experience with your child at that time. So flexibility is key to overcoming resistance. That's another fantastic way to overcome it and to work around it.
Sometimes, though, none of the strategies above work, and this is where it can be as simple as: is your child tired, and do they need a nap? Do they need a snack? Make sure that all of those basic needs are taken care of before you ask them to engage in a learning activity. And sometimes, it really is just that simple.
Other times, you may feel like you're running into a harder wall than that, where your child doesn't seem to want even your attempts to sit down and play with the dinosaurs and count them.
Either they don't want your participation at all, or they can almost sense that you're trying to make this a learning experience, and they're resistant even to that.
And sometimes that's a different kind of resistance entirely, and it is sort of a resistance to this dynamic of a learning relationship. They haven't learned yet to have that cooperation with you or to see you in that role of their guide and leader as far as learning goes, and that's a little more difficult to overcome, maybe not more difficult, but longer term that's going to require really forging this cooperative learning partnership relationship with your child.
A lot of times, when you see that type of resistance, your child doesn't necessarily feel safe taking learning risks. This could be because they may innately be a little bit of a perfectionist, and they're afraid that they're going to get it wrong.
That could be from internal pressure. That's just their personality. Some people, even children, have that sort of type-A personality, where they are very hard on themselves if they get something wrong. Sometimes, that pressure comes from externally. If they've been criticized by parents, siblings, or preschool teachers for getting something wrong, that can be a significant weight. It can make children very afraid to take the risk of answering a question or trying an activity, and not doing it perfectly, if they're afraid that that's going to cause frustration or they're going to be corrected for that.
And that takes a little bit more time to solve. The solution to that is to be endlessly positive and endlessly praising, meaningful praise of their efforts.
We need to acknowledge with our children how difficult learning new things, letters, sounds, and numbers is. Even though it seems like the most simple and basic task to us, it is obviously tremendous work for little children who are learning this for the first time.
Some of them will struggle with it more than others, but what is helpful is to acknowledge that this is work for them and, if nothing else, you can thank them for that effort and that work of learning.
And it's a habit that I would get into every single time you engage in a learning activity with your child, no matter whether they ace it and do it perfectly, or rather they make a mistake on every letter sound that they try to make: is that you thank them for the effort of having tried and participated and that you acknowledge: “wow, this is really hard work and you did your best and you put so much effort into that. Thank you for working on this with me and spending this time with me, and I can't wait to do it again next time with you”.
Praise them and thank them for the work of learning. Maybe take a break to focus on things that feel a little lower risk to your child and really build their confidence in that way before you tackle something that feels particularly challenging for them.
Another thing you can do to overcome resistance is not to require their participation at all. This one works in my experience almost every single time.
Simply model the activity yourself.
If your child doesn't want to count the cars that you've lined up for them, then simply do it for them. Offer it as an invitation, and if they refuse, just do it yourself.
This accomplishes a couple of things. First of all, they're still getting that learning. They're learning just by listening to you do it. Children are programmed to learn by observation, so the fact that they're not doing it themselves shouldn't get you that upset. They will learn so much just from hearing you do it.
And what they'll also learn is that it's okay to take that risk. They may take the 20th time listening to you count the cars, but eventually, they'll feel familiar enough with it and more than likely to join in then or accept your invitation for them to do it as well.
Don't be afraid just to model the activity. Invite your child, and if you meet resistance to the activity, say “Okay, I understand that you really don't want to do this right now, I'm going to do it, though”, and show them without exaggeration. You don't want to look fake, but show them how pleasant the experience can be. Kids are great at spotting fakes. You don't want to oversell it like it's the funniest thing in the world.
By modeling the activity and doing that over and over, if necessary, they are taking in that information, they're still learning, and more than likely, they will eventually join the activity.
The other thing that this strategy is accomplishing is a really good lesson in boundary setting.
What it's doing is showing them, instead of you trying to force them to engage in the activity, it's teaching them that through modeling, through your own example, you can't control what other people do. You can only control what you do. You're only in charge of yourself and your own actions. You're respecting their wish not to do it, and instead, you're going to do it yourself. You are modeling for your child how to respect other people and their boundaries, and what other people don't want to do.
That's the other thing that I would mention is never to try to talk your child out of their feelings about something, and to really allow them to own those feelings.
So, for example, when you offer an invitation to your child for an activity, and they say they don't want to do it, “Oh, I hate that”, but they didn't hate it last week, maybe. It's very tempting to say, “Oh no, you don't. You love this”. But I would refrain from trying to tell your children what their feelings are, even though it may feel like it's serving your purposes at that moment. And maybe they did love it last week, but maybe their feelings have changed. We all have that with different things. Even we adults, our feelings can change about an activity, or we don't feel like it at the moment.
And you can certainly remind them that: “Oh, remember last week we colored, and you really enjoyed that activity, but I hear you saying that you don't feel like doing it right now. So okay, I'm going to color my coloring page, and if you change your mind and decide that you want to color yours, then please do. Or maybe we can try it again later.”
It's another very valuable social-emotional lesson. It also goes such a long way to forming that cooperative learning partnership with your child, where they then trust you. They trust you to respect their feelings, they trust you to believe what they say, and they're going to be all that much more likely to try new things and to engage in new activities with you in the future rather than trying to talk 'em out of their feelings, which usually just results in them digging their heels in further.
By looking at all the different reasons why your child may be resistant to an activity, you can usually find a path forward to accomplish either the objective that you'd originally intended to achieve or a different type of learning moment, depending on the reason for the resistance.
And if nothing else, by working with your child through that difficult moment, even if you're not accomplishing that learning objective that you intended, you are working on that relationship with your child, which will pay off, in the end, more than any single learning objective that you might have had planned for that moment because it's going to lay that foundation for ease in the future of being able to sit down with your child on a learning activity that may be very challenging for them, or asking them to do something new and to take a learning risk and to have them trust you in that experience and feel safe to open up and to engage with that activity for the future.
So that's what you're doing. You're laying the foundation here, and that's not always easy, and there is often resistance, especially at first. Still, by keeping these few principles in mind, you can significantly reduce that in the future.
We'll still all have our resistant moments in the future. I continue to, even with my older children, but I continue to be resistant to things myself. I mean, does that ever really, really end? It's just how do we tackle it when we meet that resistance that is the question.
The last thing that I encourage parents to think about when they meet resistance with their children, and they're just butting heads and hitting a brick wall with a particular learning activity their child doesn't want to have anything to do with, is not just, well, why is the child resistant? But to really assess their own feelings.
Because we tend to get worked up when this happens. “They're not listening to me”. It can be really emotional for us when we meet this resistance with our child, especially if it continues to happen over and over. And I encourage parents to self-assess as to what they are feeling in that conflict.
And a lot of times, it is frustration that they're not being listened to and that the child is either disobeying or flatly refusing to engage with a certain activity. And a lot of it is usually surrounding fear:
These are all valid questions, concerns, and fears. But usually when we dissect them for ourselves and figure out what's bothering us about this conflict with our child and where's this fear really rooted, we can usually help ourselves to calm down and really assess the situation for what it is in the moment rather than letting ourselves get emotionally worked up about it and making it into a bigger deal than it is a lot of times.
You may actually think:
Why do I really feel the need to force the situation with this activity today? Why do I feel so emotional about it?
You may feel like you haven't done many learning activities lately with your child, and you're behind. You really wanted to accomplish something today, and this is what you set out to accomplish. You will feel like the day is a failure if you don't.
Well then, once you recognize that that's driving your insistence upon this activity, at this moment, you can take a step back and realize, okay, my child is still going to be ready for kindergarten. If we don't do this activity today, what can I substitute instead so that I can feel like we've had a nice learning moment, and I can still feel like this day is a success, but I don't need to have this conflict with my child over this activity?
So, assessing yourself is just as important as assessing the reason for your child's resistance. By doing those two things, you can almost always find a way to come together for a positive learning experience, even if it's not accomplishing the activity or objective that you originally set out to do.
I hope some of this has been helpful, and I'll talk to you next time.
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