Talk to your toddler daughter about numbers, and counting, and praise her for good engineering with her Lego bricks. Don’t ever assume ‘girls don’t …’ anything, because they can, and they will, if we believe and encourage them early on. Sally Ride, the first American woman astronaut, dedicated her life after space to getting girls to study science. It creates more opportunities for them and doubles the talent pool of good scientists, which we definitely need.
Enthusiastic Learning
Because learning and fun are the same thing for a happy child, in the years from one to five your daughter will do more self-educating than thousands of pounds in school fees could ever buy for her later on. It’s very sad when parents are too busy earning in the toddler years to have time to play and do things with their littlies. And it’s pretty tragic if when those kids actually get to school, the love of exploring has died inside them.
Kids learn to love life and learning from the adults around them. On top of their natural curiosity, they will also follow ours and catch our enthusiasm. Watch an experienced mother or father on a bus with a toddler and you will see that they point things out to them with feeling. If you are excited (or even pretend to be, just a little) she will catch your mood.
SECURITY LEADS TO EXPLORING
Though your little girl is no longer a baby, that doesn’t mean she is over the ‘Am I loved and safe?’ stuff. In fact this still applies just as much. The reason is that secure toddlers explore the most. The very first experiments in child development, carried out by people like John Bowlby and the amazing explorer/researcher Mary Ainsworth, found that babies who are ‘securely attached’ (i.e. love and trust their mum or dad to be there) are the ones who go further and are more adventurous.8 Toddlers who are not trusting of their parent or carer to be there for them will cling more and be less willing to go and play with a new toy or a new playmate. (Don’t feel bad if your toddler is still clingy, though, as there is also a fair bit of temperament in this, some toddlers just are more cautious than others.)
What makes them most secure is knowing that you are always around for them.
So they can take that as a given, and spend their emotional energies on new excitements. If they are already anxious about life, new things are just too much to handle.
Think for a minute about your attitude to insects, bugs or nature in the raw. If you say ‘Ick, horrible ants, aargh, get away!’ then of course your daughter will be scared of them too. But if you say ‘wow, have a look at this …’ she will catch your attitude. It doesn’t mean she should poke into spider’s nests or pick up death adders, but you can teach her a sensible interest and she will be fascinated for the rest of her life.
It’s the same with machines, the insides of cars and computers, garden sheds, tools and making stuff, craft work, music making, art and sculpture, cooking, dancing, loving being in the forest or at the beach, these are all ‘caught’ from grown-ups around you.
Lots of Arty Stuff Is Free
The best learning aids for your one-to-five-year-old daughter are simple and cheap. Not fancy ‘educational’ toys or gadgets which provide all the action with batteries or flashing lights; the simpler, plainer and tougher, the better.
Arty kinds of activities are encouraged by having lots of recycled paper to hand, along with an abundant supply of pencils, crayons and paints. Cardboard boxes, egg cartons, old greeting cards and paper catalogues all lend themselves to creative playing and don’t cost a penny. You can build up a considerable supply of creative materials in reserve for a rainy day or quiet time each day, and bringing out something new starts the process all over again.
But here’s a hint – be sure to get these tidied away and orderly after each session, and get your daughter’s help to do this. Then it’s encouraging to start each new play session without having to wade through yesterday’s mess. You can also alternate; crayons one day, paints the next, glue and tearing up coloured paper another, so there is more sense of new adventures to be had.
A SIMPLE ENVIRONMENT IS BEST
There is an important principle, discovered by psychologist Kim Payne, author of the wonderful book Simplicity Parenting,9 which is that a clutter of toys and materials actually makes for less play – it’s all too much choice – whereas a few simple things, in a box ready for getting out, leaves more scope for imagination. If your child’s bedroom is already awash with toys, quietly take away the less favourite ones, bag or box them, for use another time. When your daughter looks at a sea of teddies, dolls, games and bits of creation cascading all over the floor or all over her room, she feels the way you do – exhausted. And really, does anyone need more than two teddies? Well, okay, three.
Clothes
Girls should have plenty of old and tough clothes so they can be messy and happy in the dirt, or doing art activities with paint, water and glue and not freaking out about getting it on themselves or their clothes. In fact, little girls don’t need fragile or fancy clothes at all. Those fashionable frilly numbers really have no purpose for little girls except to make them anxious about how they look. Fashion on children is for the adults’ benefit, and if your child doesn’t look cute enough already in a t-shirt and rompers, then you need to read fewer magazines. (There is nothing sadder than seeing a toddler dressed in such prissy and ‘feminine’ clothing that she can’t do anything but sit and be ‘good’.)
One mum told me recently: ‘I used to say to my toddler daughter, “That dress looks gorgeous” or “How pretty you look.” But I have started to say: “Let’s put on these strong trainers (or wellies) so you can run and play.”’
MATILDA LEARNS NOT TO BE FEARFUL
(This story was told to me by my psychotherapy teacher, Bob Goulding, at the Western Institute in the 1980s. Bob was the grandfather in the story. He was a wonderful man.)
Two-year-old Matilda was enjoying playing around the swimming pool, carefully watched by her mum and grandparents. She would play happily in the toddler pool, but from time to time she would wander across to the deeper pool for a closer look. Suddenly, she simply stepped from the edge and completely disappeared into the deep water. Her grandfather, fortunately wearing some old shorts, jumped straight after her. He grabbed Matilda immediately and pulled her out. Matilda, still utterly surprised, screwed up her face and was clearly about to start wailing. But before that could happen, her granddad did an interesting thing. Holding her at arm’s length, he shouted ‘Wow! Matilda swims! What a great swimmer she is! You are great!’ while laughing and looking very pleased. Matilda seemed to hesitate, look at him for a puzzled moment – he was hard to ignore – then she did a remarkable thing. She simply changed her face to a big smile, and joined in the laughter.
Her mum came and took over, carrying Matilda back into the water and played with her, anchoring the experience into a positive one.
Would this turn Matilda into a risk taker? We don’t think so, it was scary enough to have taken that sudden plunge, but it would have taught her that adventures can be taken on the chin, and it’s better to laugh than cry. In her brain the pathways towards quick recovery and resilience were beginning to be put in place.
If we didn’t have pool fences, it might make sense to terrify kids about water. (Aboriginal parenting traditionally involved terrifying children about monsters that lurked beyond the firelight at nighttime, because it