Teaching children how to care for plants can indirectly hone various life skills. Later these life skills will be very useful when the child grows up. It must be understood, until whenever humans will need plants. While plants will be fine without humans.
That’s why, because it’s really needed, plants should be cared for with all love.
To foster a love for plants, environmental education is needed from an early age. One of the ways is through the activity of caring for plants, which must be passed on to your little one from an early age.
Not only will it foster a sense of love for the environment, but caring for plants also has a number of positive benefits for your little one, including:
- Make children love nature more
Caring for plants means inviting your little one to love and care for living things. They will also learn to take care of the earth .
Learning from nature directly is far more exciting and exciting than just reading theory. The child can get to know a wide variety of flora and fauna.
- Foster a sense of responsibility
In caring for plants, a child has to water, prune, fertilize, clean, and make sure the plants stay alive. This will teach your little one to be responsible from an early age.
So, indirectly the child’s parents have taught their children to be responsible. At first it might be hard for your little one, but over time, with the encouragement and motivation from both parents, caring for plants will become a fun activity.
- Practice patience
Caring for plants can train the child’s patience. Because plants need time to grow, so your little one will be patient in caring for them, watering them, and fertilizing them until it is time to harvest the plants they plant.
According to Herdianing (2014), gardening activities can be used as a medium for playing which can help develop naturalistic intelligence and foster a sense of responsibility and train children’s patience.
- Growing confidence
When the plants, your little ones grow and care for grow big, beautiful, and harvestable. This will allow your little one to enjoy the fruits of his labor, and at the same time will develop self-confidence in him!
- Sharpen motor skills
One of the phases of fruit development that needs to be optimized is the physical motor ability. In a Journal of Early Childhood Education Research, it is stated that motor-physical development plays an important role in forming the flexibility of the body.
One of the ways you can do to develop your child’s gross and fine motoric physical abilities is to take care of plants or gardening.
According to Beetlestone (2012) in his book, gardening activities carried out by children can provide opportunities for physical activity, releasing energy to highlight physical movements.
It should be noted that caring for plants or gardening requires a lot of physical movement, for example, digging the ground, planting seeds, watering, cleaning weeds, and so on.
· Build empathy
Through observing growing plants, your little one can build his sense of empathy. He can see how the leaves come out of the seeds that are still small, to witness the leaves of the plants grow big and can produce fruit (if the plants bear fruit).
· Relieves stress in children
Just like adults, children also need time to vent tension and boredom with daily routines. Caring for plants is an activity that helps the body produce endorphins, which can trigger feelings of happiness.
· Healthier
Caring for plants can help increase endurance. In Morinaga Platinum’s website, Brett Finlay, a microbiologist in his book Let Them Eat Dirt , revealed that there are many good, harmless microbes in the soil that can actually boost a child’s immune system. Increased immunity can make your little one not get sick easily.
· Strengthen the relationship between parents and children
Gardening or caring for plants with the family can strengthen the relationship between parents and children. Because they will often interact. Gardening moments with children can also be a fun and healthy refreshment.
· Make your little one like vegetables and fruit more
According to the Journal of the American Dietetic Association quoted from the Morinaga Platinum page, it shows that children will eat the vegetables they grow themselves.
Gardening and caring for plants that are carried out with your little one can broaden their knowledge of where vegetables and fruit come from. From seed to harvest.
Finally, those are 10 unexpected benefits of plants for your baby. So, get your kids to take care of the plants and reap the extraordinary benefits.