Parents are aware of giving toddlers a balanced diet. How many consider that we need to give them a varied sensory diet as well?
Creating a sensory-rich environment for your toddler will help them strengthen their bodies and brains. Mature thinking and learning is based on neutral pathways that develop as a child masters physical coordination, balance and skilled movement. We need to get our children back to the games we played, back to exploring a three-dimensional world where they get full of mud and run and jump in puddles.
Sensory processing disorder is a common but very misunderstood problem that affects behaviour, influences the way children learn, move and relate to others and feel about themselves. Parents need to focus on developing and maintaining a balanced sensory diet for children. As children develop and grow, parents need to relax and think about incorporating sensory experiences into everyday life.
Tactile stimulation: A child can be hyper or hypo sensitive to touch. In both cases it will affect learning and the way they interact with people. We have internal senses as well called the near senses. These play a vital role in our development, especially in the early years. Movement is the only way to stimulate this internal sense. Smell and taste are interlinked. Expose children to different smells and let them explore different tastes, even ones you don’t like.
The eyes and ears are the senses that can give us the most problems later. If we don’t process what we see and hear, we have auditory or visual processing problems which lead to learning difficulties at school.
Source: Toptots Early Learning SA, enquiries@toptots.co.za, www.toptots.co.za.