8 ways to teach your toddler to dress himself

Sep­tem­ber 1 is approach­ing, which means that chil­dren need to pre­pare to go to school or kinder­garten. The abil­i­ty to dress is one of the basic skills that kids need for a full life with­in the walls of these insti­tu­tions. There are sev­er­al effec­tive ways to teach a child to dress with­out much per­sua­sion or scan­dals.

Method number 1: We show on ourselves

Imi­ta­tion is the eas­i­est way to teach a tod­dler how to dress. For the very first “class­es” it is bet­ter to use clothes with elas­tic bands and with­out acces­sories, espe­cial­ly if the baby does not know how to fas­ten but­tons or zip­pers. For the par­ent, you can repeat not only the order of things (first socks, then pants, etc.), but also how, for exam­ple, to put your head through the hole and not get con­fused.

The main thing is to do every­thing slow­ly, pro­nounc­ing your actions, and prefer­ably not in a mir­ror image, but stand­ing next to it — it will be eas­i­er for the child to under­stand the prin­ci­ple.

Method number 2: Use pictures or drawings

An orig­i­nal and visu­al way to teach a child to dress is to use pic­tures or draw­ings depict­ing wardrobe items. They can be drawn on a chalk­board or print­ed, cut out and fas­tened with but­tons on the wall (attached with mag­nets to the refrig­er­a­tor) in the order in which the baby will put on this or that thing.

It is very con­ve­nient that you can find dif­fer­ent vari­a­tions of such pic­ture cards on the Web: for win­ter, spring, sum­mer, autumn. Usu­al­ly the pic­tures are num­bered, which makes it eas­i­er for the child to learn the sequence of items of cloth­ing for dif­fer­ent sea­sons or even num­bers if he does not already know them.

Method number 3: Dress up toys

Learn­ing to dress a lot starts with toys. The child can slow­ly “warm up” his ted­dy bear or doll. Of course, for toys it is not always pos­si­ble to find the small­est details of the wardrobe, but such an activ­i­ty per­fect­ly devel­ops chil­dren’s fine motor skills. It is on small dress­es, blous­es and boots that the baby learns to tie bows, fas­ten Vel­cro and but­tons.

And for old­er chil­dren, there are spe­cial dress-up toys and even appli­ca­tions in smart­phones. With their help, the child effec­tive­ly remem­bers the order of putting on things.

Many adults will sure­ly remem­ber paper dolls that had clothes print­ed on spe­cial “straps”. Such straps were bent on the doll and it turned out that she was dressed and even dec­o­rat­ed.

Method number 4: Let’s start together

This method will allow the baby to con­sol­i­date some prac­ti­cal skills. Mom or dad helps the child to put his head in a sweater or “direct” his legs into the pants, and then the baby is already fin­ish­ing him­self. That is, each action is rec­om­mend­ed to be cut in half: if one hand in Masha’s turtle­neck was helped by her moth­er, then she must repeat the same action with the sec­ond sleeve her­self. Grad­u­al­ly, par­ents will need less and less to take part in the process, because the child will quick­ly remem­ber the sequence.

Method number 5: We get comfortable functional clothes

A child learns to dress faster if his clothes are func­tion­al, com­fort­able and as com­fort­able as pos­si­ble. When a baby has a belt on his trousers, sus­penders, and even but­tons with a zip­per, the process of dress­ing takes him more time, and some­times it real­ly makes the child angry.

Try to buy chil­dren’s clothes that are age-appro­pri­ate, with a min­i­mum amount of acces­sories. Let your lit­tle one start with elas­ti­cat­ed pants and a zip­pered blouse, rather than but­tons or intri­cate hooks. Remem­ber, the sim­pler things a baby has, the faster he will learn to dress him­self.

Method number 6: Learn to fasten and unbutton buttons on yourself

A com­mon prob­lem for chil­dren is that they get tan­gled up in but­tons and waste a lot of time because they can­not thread them through the holes. It is inter­est­ing that it is eas­i­er for kids to learn how to fas­ten but­tons not even on them­selves, but on oth­er peo­ple — they see the whole row of holes and the view­ing angle allows them to imme­di­ate­ly send but­tons to them.

There­fore, moms and dads should ask the child to fas­ten and unbut­ton the but­tons on their clothes: the baby will work out his skills, after which it will be pos­si­ble to move on to chil­dren’s clothes. By the way, the larg­er and more tex­tured the but­tons, the more com­fort­able it is for the baby — you should pay atten­tion to this.

Method number 7: We analyze where the front and back, wrong side and front

“Know­ing how to dress” means not only learn­ing the sequence (put on tights first, then pants), but also devel­op the abil­i­ty to dis­tin­guish the right side from the wrong side, and the front from the back.

Be sure to teach your child how to prop­er­ly put on a thing: on the tag, on the zip­pers and but­tons, on the cutouts. It’s gen­er­al­ly bet­ter for babies to buy clothes with obvi­ous mark­ers on the wrong side and front side — with draw­ings, appliqués, pat­terns, embroi­deries.

Method number 8: We give a margin of time

Teach­ing a child to dress is a long process. You should not expect that in just a cou­ple of days the child will fig­ure out how not to get con­fused in the trousers, sleeves, stop for­get­ting to put on a T‑shirt under a sweater. There­fore, if you want chil­dren to learn to dress them­selves with­out tears and anx­i­ety, give them more time.

Start get­ting ready an hour and a half before the expect­ed depar­ture from the house to avoid rush. And if you want to cheer up the child a lit­tle, you can use small hint rhymes:

To get on the street
First I must put on:
Tights, warm socks
And then trousers, or trousers.
To not imme­di­ate­ly sweat
Every­one needs to wear shoes.
And only then we put on a jack­et …
And so that the ears do not puff out
I’ll tie my hat tight.
I’ll put on a coat or a fur coat
I’ll go for a walk in the street.
About the scarf and mit­tens, friends,
Of course, we can’t for­get!