Harvey Howard is the owner of My Gym Children’s Fitness Center in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. He is a certified special education teacher, elementary teacher, guidance counselor, and student assistance professional located in New Jersey. Here he explains how to tell whether or not your child’s behaviors are appropriate.
Children of different ages should not be expected to exhibit the same behaviors. What is perfectly normal for a 2-year-old, for example, may be wildly inappropriate for an older child. It is important to take this information into consideration when determining when to start working with your child on mastering certain behaviors like sharing, taking turns, and overcoming separation anxiety.
Sharing
When we are working with 1 or 2 year olds, one of the things we are working on the most is sharing. You can talk about sharing at an earlier age, but they will have a hard time grasping the concept if they are too young. For example, a child may have just seen a block and not even known it was there 30 seconds ago, and now all he knows is that he just wants the block back.
Most kids are going to struggle with this at first, but it is important that they learn the concept of sharing at this age. If they don’t learn it by the time they are 2 years old, then by the time they reach age 4 they are going to be so used to wrenching that block out of other children’s’ hands. So to start teaching them to share at that age would be way too late.
Taking Turns
Around age 2 ½, you should start teaching your child about waiting and taking turns. So you might start explaining to the child that, for example, if there are five people who want to do something, each person is going to take a turn and then he will get to go again.
So while a 1-year-old child just wants to do it, do it, do it. And if you turn him away from the toy he may not even remember it was there. An older child age 3 and up should understand that if he wants a toy but there are other people who also want the same toy, he is going to have to take turns with each one of them before it is his turn to go again. So taking turns from 2 ½ to 3 ½ is an important skill to learn.
Separating from Mom and Dad
To separate from parents is another skill that kids need to learn. For many, it does not come naturally. Some kids are terrified when their parents go to drop them off at kindergarten at 5 years old—they may start having a meltdown. Meanwhile, the kindergarten teacher is likely to tell the parents just to drive away and that she will take over and handle the situation. For parents, they need to realize that in a situation like that the longer they stay around the worse it is going to get. When a 5-year-old child is having separation issues, the parents need to just leave, even if that seems difficult.
On the other hand, if you start working with your child on the concept of separation at a younger age—like 2 or 3—then he will most likely have mastered the skill by the time kindergarten starts a few years down the road.
Here at My Gym, we actually start working with kids on separation at 12 months old. We have a separation period of three to five minutes built into our classes, where we encourage the children to play with the other children and our staff and for the parents to move back as far as they can for a short amount of time. We have to tell the parents that the children will let us know if they need anything.
Of course, at 12 months old, many children have not mastered the idea of separation just yet. And that’s OK. But what is important is that they have started learning and practicing, so they will be OK with it later on. That is an age-appropriate skill that emotionally they should be able to handle by the time they go off to kindergarten or another full-time schooling program, without a doubt.
