On Teaching

I've been trying to get Luke to crawl the past week.  Initially, my approach was to get him on his belly and put a whole bunch of toys in front of him just out of his reach.  He'd take a few stabs at them, but once he realized they were out of his reach, he'd start looking around for something else and just kinda stay put.  And no amount of toys or shaking of the toys would produce movement.  If anything, they just induced frustration.  So no real progress.

Yesterday, I ended up taking a new tack.  I just placed him in the middle of the living room floor on his belly.  No toys, no objects of interest.  At first, he seemed somewhat bewildered.  But then he started pushing with his arm and as he had most of his weight on his belly, he'd spin in circles.  Then he start rolling.  First once from belly to back and then maybe reverse that back to belly.  But then he started linking them up.  Soon, he was covering a few feet of distance with consecutive rolls.  He'd arrive at the curtains and start grasping at them with his still awkward motion where all 5 digits clench at the same time from completely open to a tight fist.  Then he discovered the air conditioning vent and start throwing his fingers in that.  And so now I think he started to make some good progress towards locomoting.

And so I think the lesson for me is that it's not my job to pick apart the skills he has to learn.  What I was trying to do with the crawling was to get him to do what I thought was the next logical step in crawling.  And it assumed that I knew what would motivate him. But when I switched to a more hands off approach where I just put him in an interesting environment where he was free to entertain himself as he wished, he naturally started moving around to find stimulus.  And I think that's my lesson as a parent: don't spoon feed the answers.  What I need to do is let Luke figure out what he wants to do and what questions he wants to answer.  I just need to keep the learning environment new, interesting, and safe.