How to bond with your kids while teaching them photography
Connecting with our child is very important. When you connect well with your child you create a confident child rather than an insecure child. As your child grows older, they are less defiant than they would be if they were left without love and affection.
When you bond with your child over the years, it helps your child become more confident and succeed better in life.
We have busy lives and by the end of the day, we are so tired that we just want to sit in front of the television and relax. However, taking out time to spend with our child is very important.
We as parents spend a lot of our time teaching our children to be more organized, to have discipline and to imbibe the values that we are taught. However, sometimes it makes sense to just relax with our kids and bond over an activity which we both will enjoy.
If you are doing an enjoyable activity, time flies by. Photography is a great activity that you can teach your kid and bond with them over. You can also introduce your kid to new aspects of nature and your surrounding via photography.
-Photo by Dan Barr
Here are a few suggestions about the photography activities that you can do with your kids which will help you to bond with them.
- Take them on a nature walk: When you go on a nature walk with your kids, you get to spend quality time with them in the absence of any distractions. You start talking to them more freely and the abundance of new things around them makes them prone to ask you questions. Going on a nature walk is a very rejuvenating exercise. You can teach them how to click photographs of trees, birds, and animals that you may encounter. This will give them a better appreciation of our nature and the surrounding world.
- Fishing and underwater activities: Another great opportunity to bond with your child over photography is when you go swimming or fishing with them. If there are any water bodies near the place you live, you can make a trip there and teach your child how to click photos out there. You can even buy a waterproof camera for kids so that they can learn how to click photos under water. With an underwater or a waterproof camera, you can click photos of fishes and corals if you are going underwater. Another advantage of a waterproof camera is that you don’t have to worry if it gets wet if it suddenly starts raining.
- Photography while cooking: When you are cooking, children love to come into the kitchen to spend time with you and to taste the yummy food that you cook. You can use this as an opportunity to bond with your child. You can either cook yourself or then let them click photographs of the food that you cooked, or you can have them cook an easy dish and then guide them how to click the best photo of that dish. Children will love to click photos of a dish that they have made as it gives them a sense of accomplishment. You too get to bond with your child and teach them two new skills i.e. cooking and photography.
-Photo by Dan Barr
Most of the time, when you are cooking, you are stressed and you want to finish the cooking quickly. So you generally have a tendency to remove your kids from the kitchen. Instead of removing them, we can partner with them to cook better and have a more enjoyable time. Research shows that when you involve your child in cooking a meal, you increase the bonding in your family and reduce behavior issues. Even though when you have kids in the kitchen, you may take more time to complete the tasks and it is less convenient since there are so many positive effects, it is worth it.
4. Road trip: For your kids, there is nothing that beats a road trip with you where they get to enjoy, spend quality time and bond with you. A road trip is a great opportunity to teach your kid photography and bond with them. You can stop at any natural scenery and click photographs since you are out the whole day long with them in a vehicle, you can show them how to take advantage of the different brightness that comes with morning light, afternoon light, and evening light. You can also show them how to click photographs when you are in a moving vehicle. The key here is to remember that you need to enjoy the journey as much as the destination. You need to take a lot of breaks at every opportunity that you get to click photographs. You can even make a collage or a photo book when you are back about all the interesting things that you kid captured over the road trip. This will give your child lasting memories of the trip and will help you to strengthen your bond with them.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are many opportunities to bond with your child over photography. You can either take out time and go out of the house and click photographs along with engaging in other fun activities like a nature walk and fishing or you can teach them photography right at home. The bond you will create when you spend quality time with your child will help them to improve their self-confidence and their self-esteem. Photography is a skill that will be with them for the rest of their lives and they will always have fond memories when they look back at the time they spent with you learning photography.
About the Author:
Dan Barr is a photographer, a parent to two girls, and the founder of KidsCameraGuide.com, a blog which is all about teaching photography to kids and kids cameras. You can visit Dan at his website www.kidscameraguide.com.
