As parents, you may have watched your young toddler’s favorite movie more times than you can count. Maybe your toddler always requests the same bedtime story night after night, or perhaps you’ve played her favorite song for the 20th time in a row.
What seems tedious to adults is actually incredibly engaging to toddlers’ brains. In fact, material actually becomes more engaging to toddlers with each iteration. That is because with each repetition, children are gaining mastery, making connections, and above all, learning.
Repetition has been called the “first principle of all learning”. This is the case for children as well as adults—repetition is the foundation on which your toddler’s brain develops pattern recognition and prediction skills—both of which are vital to learning.
When anything becomes familiar to a toddler—be it a song, story or even a routine—the toddler can begin to predict and anticipate what happens next. This cognitive exercise is not only beneficial for brain development, but is extremely comforting, too. Children feel safe when they feel that they can make sense of a predictable world around them.
Fairy’s House bakes this repetition right into the the framework of our program. The structure of our show remains consistent from episode to episode. Anticipating what happens next flexes our young audience’s cognitive skills. Knowing what happens next in turn gives them a sense of agency and mastery. Having a predictable structure has the additional benefit of making the novel learning content even more salient. Fairy’s House even repeats nature and live-action segments—facilitating your children’s learning while saving you from being glued to the remote!
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