How Building Models with your Kids Can Improve Your Brain and Bond
There’s nothing quite like a game or activity with your little one to help build and strengthen your parent-child bond. But with busy days and hectic work schedules, sitting down with your little one to do something that isn’t watching TV can be difficult. It’s key to remember that spending time together doesn’t have to be elaborate. It can be as simple as cooking together, gardening, fixing things around the house, playing games, or building model kits together.
These super important experiences allow you to not only acknowledge your child’s creativity and emphasize the importance of together time, but they also help you teach your child important life lessons like how to be patient, kind and build self-confidence. In addition, constructive activities like building model kits is a great way not only to bolster your bond with your child but to sharpen your minds together, too!
Models aren’t suitable for infants, but there are some very simple ones made for young children, and more difficult, ambitious versions for children in their grade school or middle school years. No matter which you choose, building model kits with your kiddo can have amazing effects on your bond and their brain!
Build & Protect Cognitive Function
Model kits are similar to puzzles in their ability to help build cognitive function. When your child assembles a kit, they are developing and strengthening essential cognitive skills such as visual-spatial coordination and problem-solving. It’s one of the reasons why time appears to pass so quickly when you build models: You’re utilizing your brain!
Building models also helps to develop and maintain your child’s “executive skills” like planning, organization, problem-solving, and short-term memory. For a child, building model kits help establish these skills and allows them to get a good grip on them; but for us parents, it means preserving these functions as we age. Someday, your child may treasure the days you spent building models together when they were young, and, with healthy living and a little luck, you’ll be there in body and mind to reminisce along with them!
Work with Your Hands
There’s one cognitive skill in particular that model kits are great at: Working with your hands! Did you know that well over half of your brain’s motor skill capacity is dedicated to controlling your hands?
It’s no surprise, then, that it’s important to exercise these parts of your brain by putting your hands to work on activities that require a lot of careful motor skills and focus. This is healthy for adults and young children alike. In kids, it builds hand-eye coordination and teaches fine motor control, and in adults, it helps preserve these skills against the forces of cognitive decline as we age.
Some good outdoor activities to build these skills include gardening, basketball, and playing in the sandbox.; but when weather or lack of time keeps you indoors, one of the perfect activities for exercising your hands is to build: That’s where model kits come in!
Putting your hands to work on model kits offers a solid mental workout. Models are easy to learn but hard to master: By learning how to put pieces together more and more precisely, you can keep improving your coordination skills basically without limit. For your child, even the simple act of removing the plastic pieces from their molds without damaging them will help them build their motor skills!
Exercise Your Child’s Imagination
Indulging your child’s curiosity helps you to become a better teacher, and tends to improve your own understanding of the world. Building models together is a great way to spend time with your kiddo in your role as a teacher and guide. It can also help parents and children to build motivation. But, in particular, building models can exercise your child’s imagination.
That’s where model kits are great! Getting a child’s imagination going is the key to unlocking their curiosity, and vice versa. Models are more than just an activity in themselves: They are a simulation of reality. Even if your child is building a model that simulates historical facts, like with an antique model sailing ship, or happens to be fictional, like with a model starship, it still serves the same purpose of lighting up a kid’s imagination, leading to new questions, new discoveries, and creative ideas.
Help Your Child Discover Their Passion
There’s another way that model kits simulate reality: The very act of constructing a model is an introduction to the same kind of organization skills and handiwork that many real-world jobs require, including engineering, farming, construction, architecture, law, creative writing, and medicine—just to name a few! (Did you know that the word “surgery” literally means “handiwork”?)
A child who enjoys model kits likely has a natural inclination toward some part of the model-building process. It could be anything, and it could be many years before their interests become fully clear, but in the meantime, you’ve found an outlet for them to nurture that part of their mind. That’s why it’s so important to give kids (including girls!) access to “builder” type toys like blocks and puzzles and model kits when they’re young.
Make the Time!
By identifying an activity that your child enjoys and spending time together with them on that activity, you’ll have a chance to connect with your little one outside of the bustle of everyday life. This is especially important for parents with only one child since the lack of siblings means they’re going to rely on you more heavily for companionship and play. When you share in a mentally nourishing activity like building model kits, you won’t just be improving your bond with your child: You’ll be sharpening their mind too—and yours!