Squirmy Kids are Brilliant!
I remember just like it was yesterday when I taught our youngest how to crawl. When she was around five or six months I took her to the best crawling school and supplemented with the most comprehensive curriculum at home. It was expensive but worth it because - it totally worked! They told me exactly how many times she would need to get up on all fours and rock back and forth before she moved her first hand out. We practiced for a few hours every afternoon and it didn't take long before she was a total pro! Time and money well spent!
All joking aside, can we take a moment to marvel at the developmental progress of young children? Babies who don't even know what day of the week it is, somehow know exactly what comes next in their stage of development and they know exactly how to progress through it. There isn't an adult on the planet who could structure a course of instruction for an infant better than the one they structure themselves. And yet, we tend to take over the teaching of children at such young ages. Enrollment in programs that exist in order to enhance child development start so early.
What happens to children when most of their day becomes dictated by adults? Well, they might become squirmy. That's because kids innately know that they need to move! Movement is the precursor to all learning. A child who gets his or her head out of an upright position will actually wake up the brain. Consider the stark differences between sitting still at a desk or sitting upright during circle time on the floor versus rolling down a grassy hill or hanging upside down from a set of monkey bars. Which of those activities are children innately drawn to? We take over the learning process so young that we forget how much children bring to the table as it relates to their own advancement.
Increasingly complex movements grow the brain, beginning in utero and right on through old age. The stat below from the book Smart Moves is astounding and fully displays the power of challenging our bodies with complicated motion! Children, given the appropriate time and space, will progress all on their own from rolling to crawling to walking to running to jumping to skipping to leaping to balancing to tree climbing, and so on.
“Elderly people who dance regularly, decrease their risk of dementia/Alzheimer's Disease by 76% and those that play a musical instrument decrease the risk by 69%.”
-Carla Hannaford, Ph.D., Smart Moves (Why Learning is Not All in Your Head)
As the length of school days have increased while the length of recess has simultaneously decreased, our kids who are literally falling out of their chairs have an important message to tell us! They need to move! They need to wake up their brains and get out of an upright position. They need to somersault and swing, spin and dance! Children are clamoring for real-life, hands on experience and for vigorous movement. Though they may not yet know Shakespeare or how to skip count by nines, they most certainly know some of the things they need to continue along on their developmental timelines. What brilliance! As a society we spend large sums of money to tap into the potential of children and yet our best bet may be to simply step back at times and let them work through their own progression of maturation.
The infant, who seemingly know nothing at all, forges forward with true mastery never having to backtrack to a previously learned skill, and all without any adult direction! How clever! I'd say we should hand back over some of the onus to the kids and if they are squirmy we should let them move!
We older people, partly because of our mature intellect, partly because of our defective education, get most of our education through the medium of words. We set the child to learn in the same way, and find him dull and slow. Why? Because it is only with a few words in common use that he associates a definite meaning; all the rest are no more to him than the vocables of a foreign tongue. But set him face to face with a thing, and he is twenty times as quick as you are in knowing all about it; knowledge of things flies to the mind of a child as steel filings to a magnet. -Charlotte Mason, Volume 1
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