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SHOULD TODDLERS RECEIVE CHORES TO BUILD SELF ESTEEM? (YES)

There is nothing more exciting to a toddler than mastering a skill and watching adults go gaga over his/her accomplishment. Providing that opportunity for a child is one of the most laudable things an adult can do.

Often, as many educators have said again and again, parents regard their children as toys, flesh-and-blood dolls that they can dress up and bathe and coo over. Such adult handling may well result in whining, dependent, 'spoiled' children, who can do little for themselves.

But he'll make a mess! grownups complain, when the real issue may well be that they simply can do the task faster and more competently than their children. The kids then learn that the adult does everything and they stand idly by while it gets done. In later years these same grownups will lament the child's 'uselessness' around the house.

According to Glenn Doman, a neurophysiologist whose seminal book 'Teach Your Baby to Read' was a blockbuster hit in the Seventies and Eighties, and whose work was at the spearhead of the Early Learning movement, children seek input from the world around them. Learning is an essential for them, but most children find their learning compartmentalized. Parents speak to them with 'baby- talk' and make clicking noises that will be useless to the child (unless he/she happens to be an Xhosa). They carry the child everywhere, even in the house, discouraging him from perfecting the creeping and crawling behaviors that will develop his coordination and brain development. They push little hands away when they try to help, to learn, to participate actively in the world they've been born into.

There is a 'learning look' that little ones get when they are getting the input they need. Random movement stops, they sit or stand with head slightly extended forward, and they stare at the new object or listen to the new sound with wide- open eyes. Then they turn to the parent to make certain they got it right. Once a parent identifies those signals she will do everything to bring them back again and again. New foods, new textures, new sights, new smells, new sounds, and new things to learn to do are the highlights over every day, just as they are for adults.

I remember the first time my then- barely thirteen-month old son put his jacket on for the first time by himself. I laid it out carefully, lining up, on the floor, next to mine. I then walked over to my jacket, knelt in front of

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