As much as you would like to hear about your toddler’s day at school, they are not going to be your best or most reliable source of information. It is important to manage your own expectations as to what you want to know and what your young child can actually tell you.
Very young children do not have the cognitive or language skills necessary for sharing a narrative or for answering questions that do not involve their direct, immediate experience. Children are more likely to fill in details to stories they are already familiar with (and so are predictable) than they are to give new, nuanced information. Their brains are still under construction! To give a satisfactory account of their day, your child must be able to coordinate memory, initiate information sequencing, recognize important characters and events, and even determine what may be of interest to you!
Young toddlers do not have this capacity and generally need an adult to narrate stories about their experiences for them and to help them reminisce. In fact, you may learn more about your child’s school experience through play than through direct questions!
As your child’s play partner, you can use the themes that emerge in play as the basis of a story or reminiscence to which your toddler may add some detail. To manage expectations: It is not until your child is between the ages of 3 and 4 years old that they will be likely to share (short) stories about their own lived experience, as well as ones they have heard and ones they have made up!
Since narrative and storytelling skills are works in progress, you can support your child by:
Retelling and reminiscing:Regularly talking through routine experiences from your child’s daily life is a great way to practice storytelling. Begin with a daily retelling of a familiar experience, such as the commute to school: “First we got on the bus, then we bought your breakfast muffin, and then we…” Pause to see what details your child fills in.
Offering an “I wonder what happened next?”This is another way to invite your child’s participation. Look for ways to make connections to your child’s day: “Oh! I see sand.” Then, point to the page in the book or the sandbox at the playground. “At school, YOU have sand in the sensory table! You scooooop and pour!” Your toddler may affirm that they do indeed have sand at school and even offer some other details. “Molly poured it!” It is through the sharing of details and the back-and-forth conversation that your child can start to practice sequencing. As your child matures in cognition and language skills, they will better organize and add information.
Use details that you observe or hear about as conversational prompts.If you learn that today’s outing was to the local park with the big silver slide, these details may prompt a response from your child, even if it is an enthusiastic nod or just a word or two. A reference to the park might cause your two-year-old to mention that the slide was “high, high, up!” You can build on the story from there: “You climbed high, high up the slide?”
Your toddler may not always be a willing participant in storytelling or reminiscing. Recognizing feelings and connecting them to events, for example, may be beyond many children. Tiredness, hunger, time of day, and interest in that topic at the moment may all impact how available your child is to interact with you in the first place! But, the more you make storytelling and reminiscing a natural, low-pressure part of the routines in daily life, such as during bedtime, car rides, meal times, and reading times, the more successful your overtures to discover the important details of your child’s day will be!