Children across the world have accepted the new norm in education: online learning. The COVID-19 pandemic has hijacked our traditional, brick-and-mortar schooling into a new wave of e-learning. If there is a sector that’s among the worst affected, it is education. The outbreak has enormously affected the structure of schooling, including teaching, learning and evaluation methodologies.
Schools worldwide have been forced to go online to arrange and provide e-classes and exams for their students. Though parts of the globe are gradually recovering from the pandemic, in India, uncertainty remains regarding the regular classroom learning. And that would mean children nested online for some more time to come.
The positive impact is that with parents being equally confined to homes, they are now sitting up and taking notice of their young ones’ struggles with a ‘net-tied’ routine.
A Wake-up Call for Parents during the Pandemic
With the sudden change in learning structure and the need to adapt to technology-mediated learning, it isn’t just the young minds that get exhausted but their growing brains as well.
While schools are engrossed in fast-forwarding the curriculum to meet the deadlines and make up for the compromised months, students are left with hectic hours online. Devoid of any physical activity thanks to the ongoing crisis, children’s mental and emotional equilibrium is taking a toll.
As parents are now favourably positioned to be with kids at home and involved in their learning processes, it has become easier to observe and monitor your kids in a better and closer manner. Most parents are aware and taking extra efforts towards helping their kids balance the twin-tasks of managing their studies and “keeping their cool”.
According to the American Psychological Association, the average stress level reported among adults was significantly much more than that in 2019. Also, it was the first ever high since 2007. Children and teenagers also have to cope with the emotional stress from changes in their domestic, social and school environments. Children were reported to suffer from the fear of the pandemic, uncertainty about studies and about a dimmed future like pursuing their dream courses, abroad etc.
A proven and effective practice is necessary for the capacity-building of young brains and minds. Such a development will initiate them into better productivity, healthy management of stress and overall mental and emotional well-being. What is required is a parallel cognitive development for kids to equip them for the brain-overloads.
Cognitive development deals with the way children think, explore, analyze and respond to the things around them. It involves developing skills, knowledge, and problem-solving. It helps children to think about and understand the world around them. Brain development is part of cognitive development.
It addresses a few core questions: How does a child collaborate with its environment or environmental changes? How does the developmental pattern influence traditional behaviour elements, like emotion, cognition, and social behavior?
In this Corona-struck season, how can parents address the issues in a healthy, character-building and stress-releasing manner?
Cognitive Development to Aid Online learning and Adaptive Behaviour
With long hours of schooling online, comes reduced brain stimulation. The stress of online learning – which was an unfamiliar terrain until now – affects the thought process and learning patterns in children. Such alterations in environmental patterns can, consequently, result in attention deficiency, processing speed, and memory formation of the brain.
Studies indicate how functional changes affect our memory processes, attention-sustaining and social cognition capabilities. E-learning makes the brain to switch tasks rapidly. This consumes metabolic energy and often at the neurological level.
Overload on a child’s working memory can thus affect the ability to register, process, and recall the imbibed information accurately. Such cognitive overload that is a residue of multi-method learning and split-attention can impede the child’s comprehension capabilities, and other cognitive qualities like prioritization, or storage of information. This, in turn, leads to impaired brain processing and can result in “overloading” and “dullness” when it comes to studying.
The absence of a school environment where both physical and emotional stimuli are available (as part of extracurricular activities and socialising like teaming, and peer relationships etc) also adversely affect cognitive development in children.
Under such circumstances, it is inevitable to lean on effective cognitive skill-building to enable your child to cultivate the necessary balance between online schooling and the stress it incurs.
Mentoring Students to Build Cognitive Skills
Every child has a unique brain and their cognitive development, likewise, will also be unique. Children engaged in particular types of activities and skills during their growing years will have those patterns ingrained into their brains. Hence parents need to cultivate a healthy “processing of brain” for their kids and guide them through productive skill-building.
Engaging your child with mind games like chess, helps build cognitive maturity at an early age. Complex and logical games like chess stimulate increased cognitive development. Also, such brain-games accentuate behavioural functioning that is curated by the prefrontal cortex.
Cognitive development through mind games like chess helps in critical thinking, prioritisation, logical reasoning and organisation of multiple tasks.
At MindMentorz, we train every child as per his or her cognitive development, creating a customised way of learning where the child feels comfortable.
We help the young ones in developing cognitive skills such as:
Self-control
Goal-setting and prioritising
Sound judgmental capabilities
Strategic thinking & problem solving
Planning & visualising
Adaptive behaviour
Insight and patience
Long-term memory and
Increased attention span
The master trainers at MindMentorz are experts in the game with a passion for imparting a healthy mind and attitude in children through creative thinking.
We help our students to evaluate problems logically and systematically and mentor their executive functions like working memory, processing speed, better and focused attention etc. Our various learning programs emphasize nurturing the social-emotional skills in children that equip them with better adaptive nature and healthy, progressive and focused minds.
If you are a parent who is eager to channelize your child’s cognitive capabilities in a productive way and would like to know more about cognitive skills training through chess, please feel free to call us at 9606847428.