Helping Your Child Become a Better Problem Solver

collaborative guest post

Problems are a part of life. As much as they are an inconvenience, they offer children the opportunity to learn and grow. They force us to think differently, reconsider what we’re used to and create innovative ideas. This is a skill known as problem-solving and is developed over time. The way that you can work and improve problem-solving is by considering different perspectives/thinking outside of the box and that means exposure to real-life situations. If you’d like to learn how and help your child in this area of their development, here are some ideas that were shared with us by a private nursery in Pimlico.

Identifying The Problem

Sometimes the problems that we encounter aren’t always apparent which holds us back from being able to see a way forward and put plans in place. To help your child with this, it’s a good idea to ask them to write about the situation that they’re facing. They're able to detach themselves from the problem and view it from the point of an outsider and see what the real issue is.

Play Games

Educational games are a fun way of learning and can help engage children. There are many games out there which encourage children to problem-solve and think of solutions. A few to name are scavenger hunts and puzzles like jigsaws.

Prompts

Going back to what we said earlier, considering different viewpoints is a large part of problem-solving. By this, we mean looking at problems from different angles. You can help your child to adopt this way of thinking by posing different ideas and asking questions to encourage them to think in different ways.

Allow Them to Run into Problems

As a parent, it’s your natural instinct to offer help. However, it’s not always the right thing to do. Sometimes children need to be left to make their own mistakes and gain real-life experiences as it enables them to build new skills.

Ask for Their Opinion

Another way of going about this would be to ask them for their opinion on how they would solve everyday situations like running out of certain ingredients when cooking for example. It forces their creative side out that has the potential to create brilliant ideas.

If you’ve made it to the end of this post, we hope that you had a good read and found it insightful. More like this can be found in our blog archive where we have a range of parenting guides, advice, and resources. Keep your eyes peeled for new content!