Nurturing Problem-Solving Skills in Preschoolers: The Power of Parental Scaffolding

Written by Flavia Romani

During the crucial ages of 3 to 5 years old, your little one's exposure to preschool plays a pivotal role in shaping their abilities to self-regulate, strategize, and solve problems. Encouraging self-regulated learning in your child is often achieved through interactive play with parents. This enables your child to observe and internalize your co-regulatory strategies as a parent, which they can later apply on their own.

In simpler terms: Your actions serve as a model, from which they learn, understand, connect, and independently apply their newfound skills to various situations.

While your child is within this age range, providing them with moderate support while fostering independent learning becomes essential for their skill development. This concept of parental scaffolding perfectly captures the delicate balance between a parent's involvement and a child's autonomy, as highlighted in recent research involving preschoolers summarized below.

What is parental scaffolding?

When we think of scaffolding, the image of construction often comes to mind. In construction, scaffolding is a temporary structure built beside a building, offering support to workers and materials. Parental scaffolding follows a similar principle! Imagine yourself as a scaffold for your child's development. You're the experienced adult standing alongside their evolving mind as they grasp, internalize, and practice behaviors and concepts in their environment.

Parental scaffolding involves providing temporary instructional assistance to a child for tasks they cannot manage alone. This assistance gradually diminishes as the child gains mastery or becomes capable of handling the task on their own.

Maternal scaffolding and its impact on problem solving: the study

In a recent study, researchers Stern and Hertel (2022) delved into the effects of parental scaffolding on problem-solving skills in preschoolers. They invited mothers and children aged 3 to 5 into the lab to tackle problem-solving tasks. These tasks were first addressed collaboratively by the mother-child pair and then independently by the child.

The researchers aimed to determine how a mother's scaffolding strategy, as observed through her behavior, influenced her child's capacity for independent problem-solving. Scaffolding strategies, encompassing means and intentions, were evaluated based on the number of questions, hints, instructions, feedback, and autonomous encouragement a mother provided during joint tasks with her child.

These strategies were grouped into three main domains:

Cognitive support: Offering structure and simplifying tasks, such as breaking down tasks into manageable steps or demonstrating potential actions.
Metacognitive support: Suggesting approaches to tackle tasks, evaluating progress made, and determining what remains to be done.
Autonomous support: Granting the child freedom to act independently, instilling value in their autonomous efforts.

The study’s findings

Stern and Hertel (2022) discovered that a mother's scaffolding strategy was linked to her intention in two ways:

Mothers who employed more scaffolding means during joint tasks often emphasized cognitive support. Surprisingly, this was associated with lower levels of children's metacognitive strategies during solitary work.
Mothers who employed fewer scaffolding means typically offered more autonomy support. This correlated with higher levels of children's metacognitive strategies during independent work, leading to enhanced overall performance.

Despite the mothers' intent to enhance their child's problem-solving skills through cognitive support, the study showed an opposite effect! This pattern might also apply to you, albeit unconsciously. But why does this occur?

Are you providing too much support?

When you believe your child requires extra support in analysis, structure, or problem-solving, you might tend to offer excessive assistance as compensation for their perceived difficulty. This tendency is often noticed in parents of children with neurodevelopmental disorders (e.g., ADHD) or learning disabilities (e.g., dyslexia, dyscalculia). However, such well-intentioned support can sometimes prove overwhelming. Regardless of your child's cognitive level, excessive guidance hampers their ability to internalize the cognitive framework you intend to provide. This over-involvement restricts their freedom within the task.

By meticulously planning, overseeing, and directing their steps, you inadvertently limit the time available for active practice of planning, monitoring, and evaluation skills. This results in diminished success when solving problems independently and prolonged completion times.

Too much modeling = lack of internalization = inadequate understanding = limited application to different problems

Embrace autonomy and give them time to figure it out!

Supporting your child's autonomy during scaffolding empowers them to actively contribute to the structural, procedural, and evaluative aspects of problem-solving—both collaboratively and individually. This, in turn, bolsters their skills and encourages them to leverage this experience as a guide for deliberate use of metacognitive skills in future independent problem-solving endeavors.

Furthermore, the study revealed that children don't immediately internalize their mother's scaffolding strategies after brief interactions. Therefore, it's crucial to grant your child a reasonable timeframe to analyze the task before them and to connect with the guidance provided through scaffolding support (instructions, questions, hints).

Key Takeaways

Parental scaffolding allows you to provide instructional assistance, aiding your child in tasks they couldn't manage alone.

However, as the research demonstrates, too much emphasis on structure and simplification (cognitive support) might lead to a counterproductive impact on your child's problem-solving skills.

So what’s the optimal approach? Offering autonomous support and encouraging thoughtful engagement through moderate scaffolding (questions, explanations, autonomy).

How can you be Supportive of Autonomy?

Begin by allowing your child to work autonomously initially.
- For instance, if assembling a LEGO set, let your child familiarize themselves with the pieces, experiment with connections, and understand how they detach.
Pay attention to your child's ideas and actions.
- Listen to their self-talk and encourage them to articulate their thoughts.
Give your child the opportunity to rectify mistakes independently!
Engage moderately in supportive thinking:
- When? When your child seeks assistance, exhibits frustration, or considers giving up.
- Explanation: "This doesn’t work because…"
- Feedback: "Notice that the instructions show blue pieces connecting, but the one you're trying to connect is yellow, maybe that’s why they don’t fit together"

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