In a Montessori philosophy, children are seen as individual beings-just like adults- in their own journey of growth and development. Everyday is a learning process for them and this learning is so natural and spontaneous. Thus the main role of an adult is to support this natural process and inspires to children to connect to this knowledge and skills. Adults need to captivate the children’s interest and motivate them to explore more. We don’t necessarily fill the children with our own knowledge. Teaching is not only about us the adults.  We don’t interfere in the children’s knowledge. They will develop their skills. The only thing we need to do is to sit back, observe your child and let them learn. This might be difficult for us in the mainstream world where we are so used to being the ‘superior’ being over our children. We feel the need to follow the national curriculum, setting targets on what the child should achieve. And when the child is not ready, the stress looms in. we feel that our child is behind and is not developing like their normal peer.

So how do we do it?

1)Observe your child.

We need to build the capacity in ourself to observe our child. See what they are interested in, what attracts them. Have a deep-seated trust in your kids that they have an inner drive for learning and development. Throw out all the conception and expectation that your kid needs to achieve a certain target at a specific age. Every kid blooms at their own pace.

2) Keep the interest of learning alive.

Interest is the key factor to development. In a Montessori philosophy, a child is guided within themselves by an ‘inner teacher’. It urges the child to pay attention to a specific aspect of the environment.

There are many things in the world that that a child can learns from, but this inner drive within them is what guide them to something. There are no 2 children that have a same interest at the same time.

You might see that your child is so deep in thought looking at the clouds, there could be a million of questions running inside their mind. You can follow this interest and facilitate it, you can teach them the different type of cloud, who created it etc etc.

This interest comes and go. That is why we need to observe our child carefully. Try to find something, anything that captures their attention and learn with them.

Why do we fail to follow this interest? Because we have this wrong conception that children do not like to learn or that learning needs to be a sit-down moment in a classroom.

Every single child has the inner interest in learning and they are born with that.

Look at your new born baby. He learns how to drink milk from you, he learns how to kick and crawl and so on. If we allowed them to learn by themselves this skills from young, why do we interfere with their learning and development when they are older –setting targets and aims?

It is so common that we as parents are so eager to introduce specific things to our child, that they lost interest in something that they really loves. Worst case, they won’t lead us to their interest because we are not observing and pushing stuffs that we –parents- want them to do.

3) Preparation of the environment.

If your kid spends most of your time at home with you, make sure your house’s environment supports each child’s learning and development. This way they learn more freely and we are less stress. Imagine this situation, if we want to make our child be independent, we can try having low shelf for their books/toys so they can access to it easily without asking for help from us every single time.

Or have their towel rack at their height so they can hang their towel by themselves; have a mirror at their eye level so they can comb their hair by themselves.

Making the kitchen child-friendly is another way too. Your kid can do simple chores like spread butter on their toast, set the table for dinner and so on.

It is all about how we help to prepare the surrounding to make it more easy and accessible for the kid to learn and explore.

Islamic point of view:

Parents need to be spiritually prepared to raise their kids. We need loads of patience in helping our kids to grow.Children interact best with us if they gain respect and trust from us. So be there to support your children in their learning journey.

Raising kids is not an easy feat, ask Allah for guidance always. We need to ensure their interest is in the right direction and does not deviate from Islam. A child is born with an innate fitrah. If a child suddenly shows interest in taking stuffs that does not belong to them or they are start to learn bad words, that is not fitrah! That is not an interest that we should supports. It could be an external factor- the environment around them or what they take up from the TV or internet.

Thus it is our job to channel their interest in their right path and assist them in this exciting life-long journey of learning.