Early childhood learning is super important. Why? Because a bunch of incredibly smart people that understand child psychology said so. Not a good enough answer? It wasn’t a good enough answer for us either, and that’s what’s brought us all to this article today.

If you’re looking for early childhood Northville or anywhere else for that matter, you probably want to know exactly what kind of good it’ll do for your child and if it’s worth all the money and the trouble to get your child enrolled in this kind of program as soon as possible.

Fortunately, there is a lot of information available on this topic. It’s incredibly well documented, which means that finding the answer to our question is made that much easier through the convenience of technology and the internet. So, what makes these kinds of programs so important, and who decided that they’re important?

All great questions that we intend to answer in due time, or at least before the end of this article. By the time we’re done here, we’ll all have a better understanding of early childhood learning and what kind of benefits it could have for your children.

Social Skills are Incredibly Important

Did you ever stop to think about just how much of our society is centered around the ability to have social skills? Just about everything you do on a daily basis requires social skills. For example, you need social skills for the following:

• Attending job interviews.
• Going to school.
• Buying groceries.
• Going clothing shopping.
• Signing for packages.
• Buying gas at the gas station.
• Performing your daily tasks at work.
• Hanging out with your friends.
• Going on dates.
• Resolving disagreements.
• Planning vacations.
• Attending family gatherings.
• Giving lectures.
• Going to church.
• Talking to the police.

So many things that can happen on any given day require you to have the ability to be able to socialize with other human beings while also navigating complex social hierarchies. When you’re at work, your boss and yourself are not considered on the same social level. When you’re out with friends, everyone is considered to be equal.

There are complex sociological theories that do their best to condense this concept down into something that the everyday Joe or Jane would be able to digest as easily as their morning news, but at the end of the day, the important thing is that you need these skills.

The earlier you get started on learning these skills, the better you’ll be at them when the time comes that you’ll actually need them. That’s important because, as we demonstrated, you need these skills a lot when you’re in the adult world doing your daily things.

That’s one of the reasons why early childhood learning is so important. Let’s forget about all of the academic benefits that these programs have and just focus, for a moment, on how stellar the ability to drop your kid off somewhere and have them fend for themself in an unfamiliar situation is for their social skills.

Your child will learn how to navigate social situations on their own without you supervising them at all. This might not seem like something that’s important, but it’s actually integral to this part of your child’s development, especially before kindergarten.

Your child, if at home, has likely mostly interacted with other adults at most. Potentially the occasional other children at the local playground, but for the most part, their interactions have been with people who understand how social interactions should go and have years of experience on them on this particular topic.

Putting your child into a position where they have to learn the do’s and don’t’s of social interactions on their own with other children who need to learn the same things can make a world of difference in their ability to socialize in general, especially as they continue to age.

This arrangement also helps the other children that are enrolled in these kinds of programs by allowing your child to be another person for them to test their social skills with. That means that these interactions are a net positive for all of the children involved, and that’s a great thing.

Academic Aspirations Made Easier

School is by far one of the most difficult things that people have to do in their lives. Of course, brain surgeons and rocket scientists are just beginning their difficulties when they graduate, but most people don’t grow up to become brain surgeons or rocket scientists.

For the rest of us, from your systems admin to your average everyday blog writer, school is much more difficult than the job that it prepares us for. Being able to get a leg up on education can make a big difference in our experience with the entirety of academia.

This is only underlined by the fact that children who are enrolled in some sort of early childhood learning program or preschool regularly outperform their classmates who weren’t enrolled in these kinds of programs in every stage of school, all the way up from kindergarten to post-grad school.How, you might be asking, do these programs accomplish such a truly remarkable feat? Well, the specifics really depend on the exact program you’re talking about, but we can still give you a rough idea of how these programs go about getting such great results in the vast majority of their children. For example:

• Educational enrichment.
  • This is the kind of stuff you might have a bit of in your home, but facilities that are specially designed to help with this kind of thing use all sorts of educational enrichment to help children enrolled in their programs excel. Here are just a few:
    • Toys.
    • Games.
    • Group activities.
    • Arts and crafts.
    • Books.
    • Puzzles.
  • Lesson plans made for children.
  • Interesting classroom design.

At the end of the day, these programs just give children a headstart on learning. Giving children a chance to learn about the basics before they’re graded on them allows them to enter kindergarten more relaxed. The more relaxed the children are, the better they perform on average.

Couple the basics of the subjects that they’ll have to learn in schools like math and English with the social skills that they develop in these programs and you get children that are prepared to transition into school life with ease.

The more easily a child can transition into kindergarten, the easier time they’ll have for the rest of their educational journey. That’s especially important if your child wants to become a doctor, lawyer, or something else that usually needs a whole lot of schooling.

Problem-Solving and Logic

How many problems do you need to solve in your day-to-day life? Ten? Twenty? A hundred? A few thousand? It really depends on your home life and your career path, but odds are you’re constantly faced with problems that need to be solved quickly.

Sometimes those problems are as simple as “there’s no food in the fridge” and the solution as simple as “I need to go to the store and get some groceries.” If only all of our problems were as simple as that one. Wouldn’t that be nice? Unfortunately, not every problem is so simple.

Maybe a problem has multiple people involved and there’s no clear solution that leaves everyone happy, or even most of the people involved happy. Being able to solve those kinds of problems requires a lot more than just social skills or the ability to get to the store for more food.

So, how do you make sure your child is ready to solve all of the problems that they’ll be faced with as adults? By giving them problem-solving practice at a young age so they can have their problem-solving skills ready for the real world long before they need to.

So, how does an early childhood learning program help with this? Just like preparing them for academia, it depends on the facility. That being said, there is something in common that most good early childhood learning programs have in common on this particular front, and you might have even seen it in classrooms.

Small puzzles that the children can solve on their own without any interference from adults. This mostly manifests as toy chests that aren’t as easily accessible as they could be but can still be accessed without having to ask the teacher for any help.

These kinds of puzzles help to sharpen children’s problem-solving skills, and the more practice a child has in solving problems, the better they’ll be. By the time they’re adults they’ll practically be professionals at it with the right practice.

Figuring Out What’s Important for Your Child

Parenting is stressful. You’ve got this whole little person in your care and you need to figure out how to get them to adulthood with as little trauma as possible while also giving them all the tools they need to thrive in this world.

Don’t worry though. As they say, it takes a village to raise a child. Finding the right resources to help you along the way can make a world of difference both with your quality of life and with your child’s quality of life when they become an adult.