Developing problem-solving skills in children in five steps

Have you ever noticed the confusion on your child's face when he can't fit the red ring into the color tower, after he's easily put the green and blue rings in?

You have two options: The first is to rush to your child to help him solve the problem, and put the colored rings in their places.

The second is to let him lift one ring and put another, and fail again and again from your point of view.

His skill is up to you.

Yes, your choice to address his confusion will determine your little one's skills. Even though he is only a few months old, these first months of his life will determine how he thinks and deals with things.

If you choose the first option, you are missing out on a great opportunity for your child to develop two of the most important skills he will need in his working life: thinking and problem-solving skills related to each other.

Rushing toward your child to solve their problem will make them dependent over time. They will lose their passion for discovery and will quickly lose patience, feeling that there is a faster way to success. This will reduce their desire to think and persevere. Furthermore, this will subsequently affect their motor skills, as they will not be able to hold and move things for as long. Finally, your child will lose one of the most important positive feelings: the feeling of accomplishment.

If you choose to let your child try, you have taken the first step in developing his thinking and problem-solving skills.

It will certainly take longer to solve the problem ; your child has never encountered this strange situation before. There must be a manufacturing error in the color chart. Perhaps that's what's going through his mind, but he won't stop trying, even if his attempts are haphazard at first. Soon, the matter will take a scientific turn.

still young 

Isn't that what you always say to yourself?! And indeed, as you repeat this sentence, you'll see your child as small no matter how old he gets. But in reality, he possesses mental abilities that just need to be trained and developed, just like his physical abilities. Scientific studies have revealed the importance of encouraging children to play independently and immersing them in the process of exploration. So, before you think about helping your child solve his problem for him, how about helping him in another way?

Here's a combination of words, my dear!

One of the most effective and motivating ways to encourage your child to find a solution to their problem on their own is to offer help in the form of vocabulary. There are a number of thinking vocabulary words that can stimulate your child's mind, stimulate their perception, or strengthen their metacognition. For example, look at the ring stuck in your child's hand and ask: What color is this ring? Is it big or small? Is the blue ring bigger or smaller? This type of stimulating question enhances their ability to think logically. After you ask the question, let them try again.

As your child grows older, replace this vocabulary with one that is more appropriate to what he is learning now. Decoding and problem-solving is a skill that develops with the child as his abilities and the problems he faces develop. Certainly, your child who is only a few months old needs a different vocabulary of thinking than your six-year-old, who needs mental or cognitive actions.

In a study of children of this age, the focus was on introducing a set of mental verbs, which require more complex logical processes than thinking words about size, color, shape, cause and effect.

In this study, children were presented with a story about a sad gray squirrel who lost a hazelnut, and a brown squirrel who hid it from him in a vase. The children interpreted the story with the help of mental actions that increased their awareness. They did not tell the story as a mere narration of events, but rather told it from their own understanding. They explained the events based on interpretive words that were not written in the story. Some of them came to interpret the brown squirrel’s motives that made him hide the hazelnut as if he were teasing the gray squirrel, for example. This proved that children have unlimited thinking abilities.

This combination of vocabulary or verbs is introduced to children after they have mastered expressing themselves through everyday words. It makes it easier for children to analyze and interpret different situations.

From the vocabulary of thinking to the verbs of perception

It was a long road for your little one to develop his skills, but did you realize that he went through many stages to transform from a little thinker to a user of cognitive verbs? His playing and discovering the world were never in vain, and you made the right choice when you gave your child the opportunity to go through all five "H" steps.

What are the five "H"s? And where were you when my child passed them?

The first steps of walking are not just the steps your child takes into this world; they are merely the physical steps he takes. His mental steps are complex and not clearly visible. Here, we will explain these steps to you so you can observe them and share in the moments of happiness your child experiences as he decodes things or solves problems.

The first step in developing problem solving skills in your child is the number one “H.”

The first strand of tangled wool your child will need to unravel is the identification of the problem. Watch your little one play. Remember the tower of colors and the stuck ring that would never go in? After many attempts and a few questions, two stars will appear in your child's eyes. He realizes where the problem lies; he removes the wrong ring. This is the moment when he finally gets to the root of the problem, and so begins the second strand of tangled wool.

"H" number two is "solution." But does the solution simply come after defining the problem? Of course not. However, don't forget that your child didn't spend a short time defining the problem; during that time, he or she was already thinking of more than one solution. And this is when these solutions will emerge. Your child will surprise you by coming up with one solution after another, to the point that they may even come up with five proposed solutions to the same problem. They may even play pretend to help solve their problem.

This means that if he holds a plastic bottle cap and pretends it's a magnet that sticks to metal objects, you can be sure that he's going through a new stage of intellectual maturity and is beginning to become more aware of what he's thinking. He knows full well that what he has is a small bottle cap, but he's developing a solution to his problem through pretending and hypothesizing. This is the connection that a child makes between thinking and problem-solving skills. What your child is doing by imagining a hypothetical scenario is the beginning of divergent thinking, or, more accurately, thinking outside the box.

As for the third "H," or the third step in developing a child's problem-solving skills, it is "Analyze." Your child will begin to analyze each of the solutions they propose to the problem. If the problem they are facing is caused by a person, rest assured that by the age of three, your child will begin to analyze that person's thoughts and realize that they have a different way of thinking than their own. If you read them a story, your child will analyze the world of the story. If you ask them a question about one of the characters, their answer will be based on the world of the story, not the real world. If a crocodile is a friend of a kangaroo in a story, this is how your child will see and analyze the events.

This will result in the acquisition of the fourth "h" "around".

This is a conversion skill that a child performs after analyzing the problem and converting solutions into options. Your child decides that the solutions they have presented, after studying and analyzing them, are suitable for the problem they want to solve. To reach this decision, the child will have thought through alternatives that are contrary to reality, or (counterfactual reasoning), which is another hypothetical way of thinking, but it is primarily based on the question: What if..?

Then the child finally reaches the fifth step, "Try," which is the final step in his steps towards solving the problem. The child tries out the solution he sees as appropriate after proposing, analyzing, and transforming the solutions. From here, the child feels an important accomplishment that qualifies him to solve more complex problems.

Is that all? Can my child solve all his problems with the five "H"s?

The five "H's" are your child's first steps in developing problem-solving skills, which have helped him grow. Developing them is achieved by not passively interfering in solving the problem in your own way. This way, you will have paved the way for him to develop his problem-solving skills as they become more complex. Problem-solving skills grow and develop gradually with the child.

Solutions to the method "Where is your ear from, Juha?"

You wish your child would solve the problem your way. From your point of view, the method your child chose is the same as Juha's method when they asked him to hold his left ear. Instead of holding it with his left hand, he extended his right hand and held his left ear with it!

Indeed, the solutions your child comes up with may not be the ones you thought of, but he did think and analyze. Every problem has a solution, and it doesn't matter at all whether your solution is the best after your child has followed the five steps to solve the problem.

This is what the heroine of the story "Sapling" did, the orangutan, who faced a special kind of problem, which was not being able to obtain her annual hat. From here, her practical steps actually began. Sapling definitely identified her problem, analyzed it, and put forward alternatives for it, to the point that she actually found a hat that she used as a basket throughout the story. She did not notice that her basket was a birthday hat, and she came up with a solution resulting from divergent thinking, and through her thinking with her friends, she designed a very special kind of hat.

This type of solution has a special joy, as it is a complex solution that Shatla went through stages of thinking about on her own and with her friends. Whatever the solution, coming up with solutions to problems is never-ending, whether the solution is outside the box or within the box itself.

In the lyrical story "There's a Gift in the Box," the solutions to all four riddles are found inside a small box containing a hidden toy. The child thinks through the lyrics and touches the toy to arrive at the solution. The song is based on developing the child's logical thinking skills. If the riddle is about a soft, stuffed toy with brown hair and a tie around its neck, the child won't conclude that it's a ball. The lyrics encourage the child to develop their thinking skills as they consider the qualities suggested by each riddle. The toy the child needs to think about may be in a box, and using their sense of touch, they know that the solution is inside the box, not outside.

From inside the box to inside the circle

Does your child sometimes get themselves into an imaginary problem that results from their own misunderstanding of the situation? Like the book ant , who was frightened by the line the pen drew around her, the ant was unaware that she was in an imaginary problem that resulted from her fright at the line the pen drew around her.

The ant used the first skill of the five "H" which is to define the problem. Simply put, the line drawn by the pen was just a line and not a wall. Thus, she was able to see the solution very clearly and break out of her closed circle.

Your child starts with a set of creative solutions, just as they're stepping outside the imaginary circle they've drawn for themselves. This is exactly what the mittens did in the story "This Is What My Mittens Became." The mittens considered the drawer they'd been put in after winter to be just a line, and decided to jump out of that box or drawer, thinking of different roles for themselves in each season. The mittens thought creatively, becoming a peacock or a crab, depending on the appropriate season. What's truly amazing is that your child enjoys accompanying the mittens on their creative journey, and their creativity in solving problems grows along with the mittens' journey.

Here comes the concept of the child's awareness that elephants, peacocks, and crabs are not gloves, but he also knows that sometimes we need to see some things from another point of view. This is what distinguishes the child from Delta, who records for us in her diary the problem of her magic wand , or the problem of the last breed of dinosaurs who live with her in the same house.

When Delta saw the vacuum cleaner as a dinosaur, she wasn't aware of its true nature. She didn't have the mental abilities to think by pretending or assuming like children. The dividing line in problem-solving skill is that if a child holds a vacuum cleaner and calls it a dinosaur, he does so consciously and for reasons.

What if your child has a problem with his siblings or classmates?

You have every right to ask this question. What your child acquired before entering school, or before he had siblings and played alone, is called creative or divergent thinking, and it will actually develop with him whenever he encounters a new situation.

When your child enters nursery or school, or socializes with you or the rest of your family, he or she develops deductive thinking skills, which develop through his or her knowledge of the terms “think, guess, remember,” and other thinking vocabulary.

At this stage, the child is fully aware that those he deals with may not share the same opinions and beliefs. With time, your child acquires the skill of dialogue and negotiation, as happened with Malak and Karim in the story “The Journey to Choose a Lantern.” The problem arose when Karim insisted on buying a large lantern, while Malak had a different opinion and suggested buying more and smaller lanterns. The mother excelled in positively intervening between the brother and sister, when she suggested that they reach an agreement after discussing it. From here, Malak and Karim began to present the advantages of their ideas until Karim was convinced of Malak’s idea after discussing with her and his friend, the advantages and disadvantages of the large lantern.

Thinking and problem-solving skills develop depending on the different situations a child encounters and through the stories they read. In a study titled "Thinking Skills in Early Childhood," researchers focused on reading stories to children at school and encouraging them to draw inferences from the story's context. The results were astonishing.

Whatever way your child develops their problem-solving skills, just let them go, let them run, and you'll be amazed by the results.