The Importance of Socialisation for Children in Childcare Centres

One of the main reasons to take your child to daycare is to help them to socialise with other children. This socialisation is a great way of helping to develop crucial skills for later life, and, particularly for only children, it can be very difficult to properly socialise a child at home.

Why is Socialisation Important?

If you have a young child, you’ve probably heard the term socialisation thrown around a bit. Essentially, it's the process of exposing your child to a variety of different people, which lets them learn appropriate ways to engage and create relationships with others.

One of the most important things that your child will learn from socialisation is communication skills. These are soft skills that help your child to understand social cues, as well as listening to and understanding others. It is important that this socialisation comes from outside of the home, to help your child learn it is important to give everyone the same respect.

Socialisation is also important for building confidence and independence. These social interactions are able to create new relationships to support your child through new experiences. It also helps to build resilience to make new social experiences less scary, as well as helping them learn the skills of healthy risk assessment.

As you might expect, sharing is a large part of socialisation, and an extremely important skill to learn. Sharing is not just about the act of your child giving someone else something that they value, but actually about helping them to understand that the world doesn’t revolve around their experiences.

This is called being egocentric, and all children are very egocentric to begin with. However, learning to share and learning that other people have the same ability to feel as you do is an extremely important skill.

Becoming less egocentric is also crucial to learning empathy. Empathy is an essential quality for anyone to possess because it helps to promote kindness, caring, tolerance, and acceptance.

Why Socialise at Daycare?

Socialisation is hard to do in the home, because most of the time you already have a relationship with everyone in the home long before your child becomes aware and able to socialise. This means that creating new relationships, and dealing with conflicts from different values or people who are different from you is hard to achieve at home.

But, socialisation outside of the home can be really scary, particularly if you want to socialise your child without your presence. A safe and secure place for socialisation is essential, as you also want your child to be comfortable in order to be successful at learning all these new skills.

Daycare is a great place for socialisation to take place. It is outside of the home, while being somewhere that is safe and secure. So, choosing the right daycare for building social skills is an important step for your child’s development.

Why Kiddywinkles?

Kiddywinkles is able to help promote socialisation in a variety of ways. They have great facilities, including covered outdoors areas for outside play, and a safe all-weather play room for when the weather is acting up.

There are also a range of activities available to help promote children to engage with each other and create social bonds. These include dress-ups, creative building tasks, physical play like tag or playing with a ball, and learning games.

These activities are able to help promote children to interact with each other, as well as promoting sharing and empathy for when they have conflicts. These conflicts are always mediated by a trained member of staff, so the children can be coached through their feelings while also creating essential social skills around emotional regulation and problem solving.

The highly qualified staff are the cornerstone of Kiddywinkles, and are essential to the process of socialisation. Each group of children is separated out into age groups so they can form friendships with other children in their peer group.

The staff will be able to give you updates on your child and their friends, let you know about any conflicts that may have arisen, and give you points to raise at home with your child so they can work through their feelings in a safe place away from their social group if they need to.

Socialisation is an essential skill, and it is very valuable to let your child explore the highs and lows of social relationships in their daycare environment, where they will be safe and cared for. To learn more about how Kiddywinkles can support your child in their socialisation journey, get in touch today!