Teaching the child patience

Educational skills

Teaching children patience

Patience is not an innate quality, but although the child is prepared to learn patience, his learning will not happen automatically or through a few situations. Rather, it will remain despite training for a period of time before he learns to wait at the table until everyone is seated, or to wait in line until his turn comes, but when that is achieved He will remain - God willing - until the end of his life.

The age of seven is the age at which a child is expected to be able to begin applying the patience skills he has learned. This is because his awareness, attention, and memory grow clearly at the age of seven, enabling him to realize the future, plan for it, and anticipate results, which are essential factors for developing patience. Of course, this does not mean postponing the child’s habit of being patient until this age, but it means that our expectations are correct.

The practical meaning of patience here includes three things: for the child to be able to wait, to deal with situations that cause distress, sadness, or oppression, and to learn to work steadily to achieve distant goals.

The child’s acquisition of these skills that include patience can be done in one of the following ways:

1. Accustoming the child to fasting and what it entails of postponing the satisfaction of the need for food and drink and restraining the tongue. This can be started at the age of six if the child is in good health, with the necessity of explaining the meaning of fasting and its role.

2. Guiding parents in situations that require patience and patience, by providing the child with methods for dealing with feelings of anxiety, or creating situations to practice patient behavior. Among the things that are recommended in this context are:

• Giving alternatives: When the child seems unable to wait, give him a pen and paper to write or draw. If you look at him firmly and ask him to wait politely, he may ask again when....but when you direct him to alternatives, he learns to invest the waiting time in an entertaining work or useful . Parents must always bring with the child something to occupy his time, such as stories, games, or tools.

• Teaching the child how to divide his duties or tasks into phased steps. When he has to write an assignment with 15 questions and he is so distressed that he does not want to write anything, he can be helped by solving five of them, then he comes to present them to his mother, and after encouraging him, she asks him for the second five, and so on.

• Following up on the child to complete the tasks and duties required of him, or the artistic works he begins, so that he learns how to be patient until he achieves the goal. If he wants to move on to another activity before completing a drawing he draws, he must be directed to complete his drawing first.

• Recording the child’s progress week after week in acquiring a skill he considers difficult, such as performing a mathematical movement or multiplying decimal fractions. When the child sees on a graph the improvement he has achieved, he realizes that learning requires time.

• Participation of the child in some games that require waiting for the other party to think about the move he is taking, as in the game of chess, for example.

• Reading long novels to children in late childhood; Some parents may stop reading to the child as soon as he learns to read on his own, but reading a novel in which the child anticipates the outcome of its events every time teaches him that things may take time to be completed and that we must be patient.

• The child should practice growing some plants in the home garden, watch their growth, and take care of them.

• To participate in caring for his younger siblings, or taking care of pets, while directing him to the correct methods so that he learns that the patient method is the most effective in dealing.

3. Teaching by example; When I was young, my father once returned from work and said that the traffic that day was very slow, which angered the drivers, and their shouting became louder as they waited in the hot afternoon sun. My father said, “But I was not suffering as much as they were suffering. I went to work reading Surah Al-Ma’idah and came back reading Al-An’am.” The traffic crisis excites me because I was not waiting without doing anything.

Teaching a child patience is considered one of the basic skills necessary for success in life. It is also a way for the child to learn patience in obedience and patience in God’s decree and destiny, which are among the requirements for success and victory in the afterlife.

Dr.. Sahar bint Abdul Latif Kurdi

Family and child counselor