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arents are busy day and night teaching their children how to look after themselves and others; how to communicate; how to fulfill responsibilities; how to manage their anger money and moods; how to clean up after themselves — how to do everything that goes into being able to live a spiritually emotionally mentally and physically healthy life.
Whether your children will be able to learn and assimilate all of your instruction is not in your control. Nonetheless you must do your best to teach. What then constitutes best teaching practices?
How Do We Learn?
To answer this question we need to look at what happens in our brain when we learn something. Please plow through this very short brain science lesson because understanding how your child learns new behaviors will make all the difference in how you try to teach them to him.
Without delving deeply into neuroanatomy let’s just say that learning creates physical changes in the brain. Learning a new pattern of behavior sends a flow of electrical impulses along a new neural pathway. Practice of that behavior initiates a process called myelination — which kind of “greases the wires.” The result is that those electrical impulses can now fly through the pathway at far greater speeds causing the new behavior to become fast and automatic. This is why practice leads to learning.
