The Baby Cloud Guest Blog:
Here at The Baby Cloud, we are proud to bring you our next instalment of The Baby Cloud Blog, from our friend Alex Sinclair, Alex is a qualified child psychologist with over 20 years’ experience in the field.
Here Alex gives us a view into the world of child psychology & we can read part one of a series of learning tips, techniques and tools to help increase the bond with your child.
Alex Sinclair – Child Psychologist
When Sarah asked if I would contribute to the Baby Cloud blog, I found myself going back to my earlier time as a child psychologist back in 1997, to review what made me want to become a child psychologist, and what made most impact when I worked within the field, with families and young children. I, like all my fellow professionals, had no idea what made us qualified to help in the area of parent and child development; yes there were models and strategies and thousands of studies, highlighting the importance of the bonding process. Developmental psychology, as we called it, involves the entire lifespan, however researchers mostly focus on the period in which changes follow each other fast, from birth to early adulthood.
Many studies are devoted to children, their education, and development. They explore topics such as children’s basic understanding of the physical world, how children acquire language, how learning behaviours develop, and how they interact socially with other people. These studies are vast (trust me I’ve read a lot of them), and mostly theory.
As a working Psychologist my aim is to make the most impact in the easiest digestible way. I believe my interventions should be memorable, mischievous, and non-linear. A simple intervention that would make a family stop and consider the way they think, act and feel in their world.
That’s what brings me to the reason for this blog; Sarah asked if there were bite sized, workable and doable, strategies I could pass on in these pages so I thought lets give it a go.
My first tip is learning how your child understands their world?
As humans we have 5 windows of perception!
Visual, Auditory, Olfactory, Gustatory, and finally Kinaesthetic.
Just a side note here if you are female you have 6th sense but we don’t have the time to talk about that here….
In order to pass on this learning, as the grown up, you have to go first so do the following….
Out loud name 3 things you can see!
Name 2 things you can feel!
Name 1 thing you can hear!
Now repeat with your eyes closed naming different things.
What changed?
Were the things easier to see, hear or feel with your eyes closed?
Repeat the exercise swapping the number of things per sense. For example
1 thing you can see
2 things you can hear
3 things you can feel
And so on
The sense that provided the fastest feedback is the sense you prefer to learn in so congratulations you have just discovered the sense you use to learn most often.
As humans we depend on our senses to understand the world, heads up so does your child, but they are much more sensitive to the sights, sounds, smells and tastes, which produces higher kinesthetics in their learning nervous system.
Hence why the tools you are exposed to in The Baby Cloud are so rewarding for your childs development. Sarah and her team are ahead of the curve by exposing insights through her mother/father and baby and the baby clouds toddler classes, hence why I’m happy to be here adding an insight into the development of your gift to the world.
Your child is a blank canvas to the world, they can become anything, you have an opportunity to expose them to in the importance of being them, through not only The Baby Cloud but also the world you live in.
So until the next time learn for the world you move in, and be sensitive to your child's choices in how they understand theirs.
In the following blogs, we will be looking at various techniques and models that will develop into a series of tools that will increase your bond with your Childs development, in partnership with Sarah and her team.
Alex
Wow – Thank you to Alex for your first tip on learning how our child understands the world as part of The Baby Cloud blog – fascinating!
We can’t wait for the next instalment from you!
Watch this space for more guest speakers in the coming months. #childpsychologist #babydevlopment #babybraindevelopment #thebabycloud #babybrains #babybrain
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