Early Childhood: Ensuring the Development of High Potential

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From 2 through 5 years of age, the child’s mental powers show rapid growth. Speech, mobility, and increasing social involvement all add to fast-paced intellectual development. From the work of Campbell and Ramey (1995) come essentials for positive nurture:

• Encourage children to explore.
• Praise their accomplishments.
• Help them practice and expand their basic skills.
• Protect them from disapproval, teasing, and punishment.
• Surround them with a rich, responsive language environment.

Two-year-olds may seem inflexible and are often very vocal about their demands. Their energy is abundant and their curiosity is high. Children at this age enjoy routine because they have difficulty making up their minds.

Three-year-olds seem to feel much more secure about their world. As language and motor activities rapidly develop and social skills increase, this age group needs caregivers to explain and model behaviors such as generosity, altruism, and care for others. Other important conditions for 3-year-olds include affection and responsiveness to the child’s needs, a stimulating and varied environment, encouragement of exploration and independence, and fair discipline.

The play materials from previous periods are useful, but in different ways. Three-year-olds create, draw, pretend, and imagine, but only if allowed to and if provisions for these activities have been made. Space to explore their way and time to “do it myself” are needed. Children at this age are now thinkers. Early cognitive psychologists such as Jean Piaget (1952), Lev Vygotsky (1962), and Jerome Bruner (1968) have helped us to understand how thinking develops.

However, what most cognitive psychologists are describing is the development of only one of our mind functions, the linear, rational function. What about our other functions of the mind, those integrated into the metaphoric, intuitive, more holistic thinking valued by Einstein, Bruner, da Vinci, Salk, and a myriad of other creative thinkers who have changed our culture?

Where the linear, rational mind views by seeing the differences, the creative, intuitive mind views by seeing the connections, allowing an extension or expansion of the original idea. “The petal of the flower looked like white velvet” provides two unlike objects that serve, by the connection, to extend and enhance your view of the flower.

The creative, intuitive mind is available throughout our lives, and its use can be shown to result in higher feelings of self-confidence, self-esteem, and compassion; a wider exploration of traditional content and skills; and higher levels of creative invention. However, current teaching strategies, environments, and curricula often neglect its use. The acceptance of the metaphoric, holistic functions of the creative, intuitive mind that occur at the beginning stages of young children’s learning experiences seems to disappear as they progress in school. Teachers at home and at school must accept and value this important part of each child, encourage its development, and create spaces for its use. This will allow the development and integration of both linear, rational and creative, intuitive functions of the mind, thereby optimizing the actualization of the child’s fullest potential.