Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to Unruffled ad-free right now.

Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.

Hi, this is Janet Lansbury.

Welcome to Unruffled.

Today, I'm responding to a question about doing learning activities with our children,

like teaching them the ABCs.

Here's the interesting email I received. Hi, Janet. I'm wondering, is there a respectful

approach to teaching children, say they're ABCs or doing any learning activities? I work as a nanny

and the family I'm currently with is very interested in their son's learning and development.

Sometimes he's happy to go along with loosely structured learning activities and some days he's disinterested.

I'm wondering is it best to end an activity if he's not showing interest slash refusing to participate?

Or come back to it later or what? I wouldn't want to teach him to give up

on things or that he just needs simply to offer a little resistance and then he gets what he wants.

I really like the respectful approach and use this approach as much as possible. Any words of

wisdom for those of us who use this approach as a nanny

would be very much appreciated. Thank you for any advice. Okay, so what I'm going to suggest

would apply to a nanny in this situation or to other kinds of caregivers of children and to parents.

What I'm going to suggest is an alternative.

While there may be a respectful way to do these learning activities with children, I'm sure there is.

The question I want to pose in return is, are learning activities the best way to help children learn? You can probably guess,

I believe they are not. And I'm going to talk about why in this podcast, but mostly I want to

offer an alternative to teaching children their ABCs and directing them in learning activities.

...