I have sat across from a lot of parents at parents' evening. More than I can count, over more years than I sometimes care to remember. And in so many of those conversations, I have felt the same quiet frustration, not with the parents, never with the parents, but with timing.
Because by the time a child walks through my classroom door, so much has already been decided. Not in the dramatic, irreversible sense. Children are resilient and adaptable, and good teaching makes a real difference. But the early years, from birth to around five, are doing foundational work that no amount of clever classroom strategy can fully replicate later on. The brain during those years is building itself at a pace it will never match again. The habits, the language exposure, the physical confidence, all of it is quietly being assembled, day by day, in the years before school has even entered the picture.
So I want to speak to the parents of babies. The parents of toddlers who are currently dismantling your living room. The parents are sitting with a preschooler who has mud on their knees and a stick in each hand. This one is for you.
Here are three things I genuinely wish I could have told you earlier.
Talk to Them. Constantly. Even When It Feels Ridiculous
I know. You have heard this before. Talk to your baby. Read to your baby. Chat about what you are doing while you do it. Narrate the trip to the supermarket. Name the things on the shelf. Describe the weather on the walk home.
It sounds simple, and it is. But the reason it keeps coming up is because it keeps mattering enormously, and the window for it is shorter than most people realise.
From birth to around two years old, your baby is not just sitting there looking cute. They are absorbing everything. Every word you say, every face you make, every back-and-forth exchange they witness, all of it is teaching them what communication looks and sounds like. They are building a vocabulary they cannot yet use. They are learning the rhythm of conversation, the way eyes meet when someone is speaking, the way a voice rises at the end of a question.
If you ever wonder how a child arrives at school at four or five and already knows how to listen, how to follow a speaker with their eyes, how to wait for a pause before responding, that child has a parent or carer who looked at them when they spoke. Who did not talk to them from across the room with a phone in hand, but sat with them, face to face, and communicated like it mattered. Because it did.
Phones down. Face to face. It is that simple and that hard.
If talking to a baby who cannot yet answer feels odd, read aloud. Long picture books, short board books, anything. Your voice is the gift. The content almost does not matter at this stage. What matters is exposure, sheer, sustained, warm exposure to words and the human face that delivers them.
Let Them Get Muddy, Climb Things, and Fall Down
This one I feel strongly about, and I have watched it play out in too many children to stay quiet about it.
When a preschooler squats down beside a puddle with a stick they found on the ground and starts poking around in the mud, they are not wasting time. They are learning. They are developing the physical dexterity that will later allow them to hold a pencil. They are practising the kind of focused, self-directed attention that school will eventually ask of them constantly. They are making decisions, testing outcomes, and building an understanding of how the physical world responds to their actions.
Risky play, climbing frames, dangling from branches, negotiating uneven ground, taking tumbles, does the same work but adds something extra. It develops core strength and body awareness. It teaches the body to stabilise itself, which is exactly what a child needs in order to sit still at a desk and concentrate on writing. And it builds a genuinely felt understanding of risk, what happens when you go too high, what your body tells you when something is beyond your current ability, how to assess a situation before committing to it.
I am not being flippant when I say this: a scraped knee in the garden at three is vastly easier to heal than a poor relationship with risk in adulthood. Let them climb. Let them fall. Stay close enough to be helpful, but let the experience happen.
Mud, sticks, water, rough ground, physical challenge, these are not things to protect children from. They are the curriculum of early childhood, and they cannot be replicated on a screen.
Stop Teaching the Alphabet, And Put the Pencil Down
I say this with complete kindness and enormous respect for the instinct behind it. Parents who sit down with their toddler and try to teach them letter names are doing it out of love and wanting the best for their child. I understand that completely.
But in the UK, and in many countries with strong early literacy outcomes, the dominant approach to teaching reading and writing is phonics, a system built around sounds, not letter names. When a child comes to school already knowing the letter names, it can genuinely create confusion in the early stages of phonics teaching. The child has to unlearn something before they can properly learn the thing the curriculum is built on. That is not a disaster, but it is an unnecessary obstacle.
The better instinct for early literacy is songs. Rhymes. Rhythm. Anything that plays with sound and repetition. Counting songs in particular are genuinely valuable, they feed naturally and effectively into how number skills develop. Let the alphabet song wait. Let the counting songs play on repeat as much as your sanity allows.
On the question of pencils and handwriting, here is something most parents do not know. A young child's hands are mostly soft tissue. The bones in small fingers are not fully developed until around seven years of age. Gripping a pencil correctly and holding it for any length of time is genuinely uncomfortable for many preschoolers. When we push pencils into their hands too early and pressure them toward correct grip or neat letter formation, we are asking a body to do something it is not yet physically ready for.
What you can do instead: let them use brushes, thick chunky crayons, chalk, sticks in sand, fingers in paint. Let them explore mark-making without the pressure of performance. Wide movements on large surfaces develop the shoulder and arm muscles that fine motor skills eventually grow from. The pencil will come in its own time, and when the hands are ready, it will come more easily.
The Window Is Open Right Now
That is it. Three things: talk constantly, let them play physically and freely, and resist the urge to start formal academic teaching before they are ready.
None of it is expensive. None of it requires a special programme or a set of carefully chosen educational toys. It requires time, presence, and the willingness to trust that a child squatting in a puddle with a stick is doing exactly what they need to be doing.
I have seen children arrive at school ready, genuinely ready, and it is a beautiful thing. Ready children are not the ones who already know their letters. They are the ones who look at you when you speak, who can negotiate physical space confidently, who are curious and resilient and know how to engage.
You are building that child right now. Every conversation, every muddy afternoon, every counting song on the way home from nursery.
The classroom door comes soon enough. Make the most of what is on this side of it.