Diversity in Babysitting!

Throughout my lifetime I have had the opportunity to babysit many different children. They have varied between the ages of six months and eleven years old, and of course there were some that were boys and some that were girls. During my experience of babysitting these children I learned that there are not two alike. Each child has their own thought pattern, sense of humour, discipline response, behaviour, personality, appearance, and etcetera. Even though all of these children were different in their own way, I loved them all the same. They all had their moments where they loved me and where they hated me because I wouldn’t let them do exactly what they wanted simply because I knew that it was not a good idea, but they did not understand this at such a young age.

Diversity of these children was evident when playing outside with them. There would be the children who would look for anything bad to do outside so that they could cause a problem, and there would be the children who would ask before doing anything that may cause them to get into trouble. There were also the children who wanted to play rough and there were the children who played quietly and gently. These characteristics always resulted in an interesting and sometime frustrating play outside.

Likewise the diversity in these children stood out when watching the television also. The family’s religion and beliefs were evident as some of the children would put on a show that had awful language and then some children were content watching cartoons. This mainly depended on the age level as a two year old obviously would rather watch cartoons whereas a twelve year old is at the stage where it is cool to swear and what not.

Babysitting these children of different backgrounds, races, beliefs, ages, genders, personalities, tempers and etcetera has taught me different ways to respond to children of all different types. This experience will benefit me greatly when teaching in a classroom as I have learned to deal with all different children. Although I am ready for the challenge of learning how to deal with the new types of children I will meet in my future endeavours of teaching.

Kim