How to support your toddler with solving problems

We all face problems on a daily basis, no matter our ages, and your toddler will face them too. Thinking about a problem takes time, resilience, critical thinking, experience, reflection and decision-making. Being able to do all this is VERY complicated and these skills all need nurturing. Let's take a for instance and explore this skill from there: 

Your toddler carries a bag with a zip open and everything falls out. They are surprised by the fact they have an empty bag and don’t understand why.  

To be able to solve this your toddler needs: 

• Time. To solve a problem and learn from it, your toddler needs time to think about and process what happened. 
• Skills in critical thinking – why did it happen? Learning how to think is a complex process. As they grow, children constantly need to be able to think about what they are doing and plan their next actions. They need to understand what they see or hear and be able to make judgements and think critically. 
• Experience. Experiencing the same problem again and again helps your toddler to learn a bit more each time. 
• Time to reflect. If they have experienced the same problem before, they need more time to think about what happened last time and they can stop this happening again. 
• Resilience – keep on trying. Your toddler might try the same thing over and over again. Building resilience takes time and it might be that solving the problem takes a few days, a week or longer.  
• Decision-making. As not all things work the first time, your toddler should explore and experiment with trying different ways to solve their problem. Decisions need to be made based on any prior experiences and their thoughts. 

Problems are often complex with no one-size-fits-all solution.  

This group of skills doesn't happen in any specific order, so your toddler might go through some of them multiple times before they make the connection between what they did (or didn't do) and what happened. But once it’s made, they’ll learn from it and in this scenario they’ll know how to keep their items in their bag. 

How do you help your toddler develop these skills? 

Toddlers are naturally curious and eager to solve problems for themselves; encourage this interest.   

Ask open-ended questions to help them think outside the box and assess the problem; something like, “I wonder where the items in your bag have gone,” or, “How did your bag become empty?” 

Encourage their independence. Step back and let your toddler try out their own solutions (making sure they are safe while leading their own investigations). 

Acknowledge and praise their efforts. 

These simple steps of overseeing your child can help them become more independent and be resilient enough to tackle problems on their own.