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 parents can help develop readiness in their young children.
The best way to develop readiness in children is to keep exposing them to the building blocks that they need to grow. If you continually put these building blocks in their lives, these activities and challenges in front of them, they will be ready for it when the time comes. They will see these challenges and look forward to tackling them.
People commonly ask me, when is the best time to enroll their child in a gym? I say, as soon as possible. I say this because they—the children—are watching. They are listening, even before they are wobbling, to what is going on around them. And when you put a child in a gym, that means he is getting to experience other kids, being put into different positions, doing all these fun things from a younger age. Even for the youngest kids, you are working with them on the tumble form, you are playing with them in the balls. You can swing them upside down and play on the slides together. There are so many interactive things to do.
So they are having all these different experiences that seem very normal to them because they are experiencing these things at such a young age and on a regular basis. And because of this, they feel confident and ready to go. But to a child who has never gotten to participate in these things, to him they may seem foreign or scary.
Even if a child isn’t taking formal classes yet, they are still watching what other people are doing. Kids copy and they model. So therefore as soon as they get the chance to participate they are going to be right there. They are already eager and wanting to try these things. They have watched, and now they are ready to check it out for themselves.
For example, here at My Gym we have a little one who has been coming into the gym with his older sister since he was like three weeks old. As soon as he was able to start crawling, he was crawling all over the gym. He was suddenly visiting all these things he wanted to touch. And part of this was because he wasn’t able to do any of that before. Then, eventually when he could walk, he was running all over the gym. He comes in now and he is non-stop. He’s doing all these things, these activities, that he has wanted to do since he was a baby but didn’t have the mobility to try before. But now he can do them all, and he is comfortable and ready to do that.
So his readiness level is way up already, and he is ready to try everything. Unlike other kids who haven’t been exposed, he is seeing all these things and eager to try it. He’s been seeing kids laughing and playing here for as long as he can remember. To him, he is like “I am ready to try whatever you want to do.” He is ready to have a good time.
So readiness is about putting your kids into situations where they are continually exposed to small pieces of a skill or activity that you would like them to accomplish. And then, over time, they are accomplishing each of these small skills and building towards something more complex. Eventually they can handle these complex challenges, all because they started small and they were ready when the right time presented itself. And that is what readiness in children is all about.
