It’s so important to read to your children, provide them with guided, educational activities, and help them with their homework. Their young brains are sponges and it’s our job as parents to spark a love for learning in them. Let them play math games on the computer, put together puzzles, and build things. But, please please please, also let them play. Just play. Free time to use their imaginations with no rules (well, other than safety rules of course). Let them run around and be crazy. Let them climb and swing and explore. What they get from this, they cannot learn in a book.
I have wonderful memories of Mom reading A Fish Out Of Water, by Helen Palmer. I can still hear her voice when I read it to my boys. I can remember traveling to Des Moines with my brother and sister to explore the science center and other educational/historical sites around town. But, my fondest memories from childhood might have to be running barefoot in the grass and climbing the corn bin. It was running free outside that taught me to be curious about the world around me, and it was sitting on top of that corn bin that I learned to be brave and trust myself. These were the life lessons that made me who I am.
I will do my best to read to my boys every night, I will take them to museums and science centers, and I will always make time for them to play. I want to give them the opportunity to learn that all they ever need to be successful in life, is already inside of them.
