The "Science of Learning"

Anthony James

Our theories of education generally rely upon the idea that learning is built upon learning; that we start with simpler things, foundational things, then, like with a building we construct learning brick upon brick.

I'm sure that learning happens in that way some of the time for some of us, but there is very little empirical evidence that this is how it works for most people most of the time. Indeed, despite marketing assertions to the contrary, there really is no "science of learning." Or rather, we are far from any kind of consensus on how humans learn. Any school that claims to be following the science doesn't understand science.

Science is an ongoing process, one that starts with a question to which there is not yet a satisfactory answer. We then form a hypothesis, test that hypothesis, draw conclusions, then send it all out into the world for others to test for themselves. There is no such thing as settled science. Sometimes, on some questions, there is a scientific consensus (for instance, around human impact of climate change or the overarching Theory of Evolution), and it behooves us to heed that consensus, but even that is subject to new theories.

That said, there is nothing even close to consensus around how humans learn and anyone who claims there is some sort of cookie cutter or system or step-by-step approach or scientific way of teaching or learning is a salesperson. Perhaps a well-intended salesperson, but a salesperson nevertheless.

I read extensively about things like the human brain, consciousness, cognitive psychology, physics, history, nature, and philosophy. I also read a lot of fiction and a little poetry. Not long ago, I met the head of neuroscience at a major university, who personally knew many of the authors of the books I've read. When I tried to engage him in conversation, he told me that much, if not most, of what we read about brain theory in books written for laypeople is already at least a decade out of date because the "science moves so fast." 

I love that I can following along with the scientific process book after book, albeit a decade or more behind the professionals.

I read widely because often an idea from philosophy or poetry or physics or history will clarify or amplify or completely contradict what this or that other brilliant mind is proposing in a different area of study. I find myself drawn to scientific writers like Carlo Rovelli, one of the world's leading physicists, who can write, for instance, a book about white holes (the theoretical destiny of black holes) while weaving pertinent lines from Dante's Devine Comedy throughout the text. Not long ago, I read a book called Devine Fury: A History of Genius by historian Darrin McMahon in which he tells the story of how our definition of genius has evolved over the eons. It's an ongoing story that if we survive long enough to keep telling, will likely, one day, make future humans wonder what we ever saw in that misguided Einstein fellow.

The great wildlife ecologist Aldo Leopold wrote in his masterpiece A Sand County Almanac, "Education, I fear, is learning to see one thing by going blind to another." It's an idea that echoes Socrates' perfectly valid concern about the intellectual blindness that was sure to result from the introduction of the phonetic alphabet.

Nobel Prize winning author Doris Lessing wrote, "That is what learning is. You suddenly understand something you've understood all your life, but in a new way." It's an idea that foretold the current theory that the vast majority of our thinking takes place beneath the level of our consciousness.

Many cognitive scientists, echoing the philosophical theories of Enlightenment thinkers like John Locke, see long-term memory as the powerhouse of the brain, asserting that expansion of our long-term memory leads to an enlargement of our intelligence. Others point out that our memories tend to be wildly inaccurate and that, indeed, the more often we call upon a specific memory the more likely we are to alter it, often profoundly. This is why eye-witness court testimony can be quite unreliable or why when you meet an old friend after a long separation, you so often remember shared moments so differently.

Educators like Ivan Illich and John Holt assert that learning is "the result of unhampered participation in a meaningful activity" and that "(l)earning is the product of the activity of learners."

Neuroscientist Patrick House says that in the end we might well find that there are as many kinds of minds, as many kinds of consciousness, as there are humans. This would mean that the so-called "science of learning" is unique to each of us, and even that would likely change over time or be dependent upon what exactly is being learned. He writes, "Every brain has vastly more stores than all modern AIs and machines combined. Biology is messy at the level of its atomic and molecular happenings, but contained in all that messiness is a staggering amount of ways to be."

Technology is defined as the application of scientific principles for practical purposes. When someone asserts that their method or technique represents the "science of learning" what they are really saying is that they've invented something that helps some people, some of the time to learn certain things. This does not mean that it is the best way to learn something, just that they have a technology for sale that takes advantage of some narrow, and perhaps temporary, discovery of science. If it were truly the science of learning, it could not be packaged up and sold as a product because it would have to be updated and modified at the pace of not just brain science, but all other human disciplines as well.

At the end of the day, I'm a play-based educator because that is the lesson I've learned so far from science and history and fiction and philosophy. When we play, when we pursue our curiosity, when we ask our own questions and then go about answering them, we are engaging directly the great mystery of existence, playing with ideas for their season, following tunnels to see where they lead, finding ourselves in strange, uncomfortable places, then wiggling out of them again. A life of learning is the scientific process, lived by each individual amongst a universe of individuals who are engaged in their own scientific process.

As for the technologies of learning, engage them as you see fit. Play with them. Maybe you'll learn something from them, but know that there was a time when smoke signals, then the telegraph, was the most up-to-date form of communication. Play with them, learn from them, but never allow yourself to be trapped by them: they are technologies, after all, designed for profit, intended to make natural resources of everyone and everything they touch.

As the late, great folk singer and philosopher Utah Phillips said to a class of graduating university students, "They're about to tell you you're America's greatest natural resource . . . Run for the hills!" That's what I find myself wanting to do whenever I hear the phrase "the science of learning."

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Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Experiencing Reality Just as the Rest of Nature Does

As a boy, the closer it got to Christmas, the slower the days would pass. We would say, "I can't wait!" barely able to contain the anticipation, but wait we did, finally awaking on the day of magic and presents.

My wife Jennifer and I recently spent a weekend in a place that is a two-and-a-half hour drive from our home. The 2.5 hours getting there seemed interminable, while the trip home, despite taking the exact same time on our clocks, just flew by.

Clock time and lived time are two different things. In his novel The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann writes of the difference between time lived upright and active (vertical time) as opposed to time lived simply lying about (horizontal time). When we're fully engaged in life, lived time tends to pass in the blink of an eye, yet upon reflection it, when we consider all that we've done, that same time feels long. On the other hand, life lived in the horizontal (like spending months in bed in a sanatorium as Mann's character Hans Castorp does in the novel) the days pass slowly, while in hindsight, they are a blur into almost no duration at all.

This feeling of duration is the lived experience of time. Clock time is different. For one thing, it's divided up into hours, minutes, and seconds. Scientists sometimes measure time in nanoseconds (one billionth of a second), but no matter how small the unit, the clock still creates the illusion that time passes in ticks and tocks rather than, as it we experience it, as a flow. Lived time is not granular. It's continuous, the past blending and shaping the present emerging moment. As philosopher Henri Bergson sees it, when we experience time as long or short, this felt difference is duration. Duration is tied to awareness. It's how reality unfolds for each individual, not how it's measured externally.

By now, most of us have heard the astounding news that the overwhelming majority of physicists are convinced that time is not a fundamental aspect of reality. The math tells them that there is no good reason why time should flow from past to future the way we experience it. They tell us that our experience of time is a psychological phenomenon rather than something real.

When we observe children at play, we are the ones watching the clock while the children are immersed in duration, an ever-emerging present in which time stretches, compresses, and flows. Nature does not create measuring tools, like clocks, only humans do; nature does not read measuring tools, only humans do. Clock time is an attempt to stand outside of the flow of lived time in order to measure it objectively. This is, of course, an absurdity: it presupposes the possibility of measuring time and reading measurements of time from the perspective of no where. This is an impossibility because we are always, inevitably, viewing reality from within reality, and that requires a perspective from somewhere.

And from within reality, time is experienced as duration.

Young children might look at the clock in imitation of our adult habits, but it has nothing to do with reality. They have not yet learned to perceive time as units to be managed, but rather they know it as a flow, thick with memory, imagination, and meaning. This is exactly what we witness in their play, time stretching, looping, and disappearing. This is why clock-based schedules are so difficult for so many young children. They have not learned the to obey this arbitrary measuring tool. It's why clean up time always comes too soon or lunchtime comes too late.

We adults, of course, live in a timetable world, one that is regulated by the myth of time as being comprised of discrete, consistent, replicable units. It's an illusion that our children will one day have to adopt, but just as preschoolers are typically not developmentally ready for literacy or math instruction, they are likewise not capable of stepping outside their lived experience of time as duration. This is why I urge early childhood educators to abandon clock-based schedules in favor of duration-based routines.

One of the joys of working with young children is this opportunity to spend our days living inside time's emergent now, something that can't be measured, only experienced. When we allow young children to lead us there, we are finally experiencing reality just as the rest of nature does. That's a gift young children give us.

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Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

It Needs to Be Enough

I used to keep a collection of styrofoam around the place, but over the years I've disposed of it and not just because it takes up a lot of storage space. Sure it's fun to stick or hammer things into it, like golf tees, but that idea invariably and ultimately turns into a festival of breaking, then shredding, leaving those static electricity filled tiny toxic balls all over the place, which is a mess worse than glitter and not nearly as festive.

Still, when someone from our community purchases new electronics or something that comes with large pieces of the stuff, they often think of us. I don't even know where our most recent pieces came from, but I'd spotted them stashed where the kids couldn't reach them on the playground so decided to make use of them for a day.

My idea was to combine the styrofoam with pipe cleaners. It's not the first time we've done this and while there are usually a few kids who get into the process, it's not generally one of the most popular things we do at the art table. Last week, however, there were even fewer takers than normal. The parent-teacher assigned to the project did her best to role model playing with the things, but the station was evolving into a game in which kids were placing "orders" for things like pipe cleaner "bracelets," "flowers," "glasses," which the adults then manufactured for them. It's a fine activity, I suppose, and I guess the kids had found a way to make it fun so who am I to judge?

That's how things stood when my friend took a seat at one corner of the styrofoam and pulled a container of pipe cleaners toward himself. If he had taken note of what the others were doing, it wasn't apparent. He started by successfully sticking one end of a pipe cleaner into the styrofoam, then another, then another. As he worked, he began to twist the fuzzy wires, bending the pieces together, weaving them together, purposefully tangling them. He didn't say a thing as he worked, concentrating fully on his creation.

I was tempted to sit beside him, either to ask about what he was doing or to, as I often do, begin narrating his process in the hopes of attracting more kids to the project because everyone wants to be part of our classroom's ongoing stories, but I didn't. Instead, I left him to his solitary work, a man with a vision. I stopped by several times over the course of the next half hour as his magnificent tangle became increasingly complex. When he was finally finished a half hour later, he pushed himself away from the table and didn't look back.

I gave some 40 kids the opportunity to play with the styrofoam and pipe cleaners over the course of the day, most of whom declined the invitation and even those who accepted it tended to treat it like a kind of drive-by activity, something not worthy of their full engagement. But one boy did and that's enough for me to call it a success.

We carefully uprooted his sculpture from the styrofoam and put it in his cubby to take home. I'm sure from his mother's end, it just looked like he had simply crushed and twisted a collection of pipe cleaners in his fists, the work of a moment. Most preschool art goes home this way, a product that can't by itself tell the story of how it came to be. I've described the visible part of his process here. I can make guesses about what he learned. I could question him. I could even, I suppose, devise some sort of pre-test and post-test and compare the results to produce "data," but at the end of the day no one but this boy will ever know what questions he asked and answered while creating this purposeful tangle of pipe cleaners stuck into styrofoam. 

It needs to be enough for us to know that it engaged him until he was ready to walk away.

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Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

All Learning Starts With a Sensory Experience

A single flax seed is a tiny golden fleck, so small that a single one is hardly noticeable to the human eye, so insubstantial that its fragrance is undetectable, so meager that one can barely feel it with a fingertip, so delicate that a single one on the tongue barely registers, so light that we don't hear when it falls onto the floor.

But if you fill a sensory table with 50 pounds of flax seed, you've created something irresistible to human senses. The earthy smell overwhelms the room. It's almost impossible to resist plunging your hand into them, feeling the silkiness as they slide across one another, almost like a liquid, but surprisingly crisp and dry. As you stir those seeds with your palms you become aware of a the shh shh sound they make as they interact with and against one another. When you pull your hands away, you notice that the seed oils remain, softening your skin and now they too smell of flax. And when you put a pinch of them on your tongue, you can finally taste their light nuttiness.

Some, both children and adults, find the experience of 50 pounds of flax seed in a sensory table so enveloping that they will remain there for an hour or more, swirling, scooping, and plunging their body parts into it. 

I know there are some who will be appalled by the "waste" of food that 50 pounds of flax seed in a sensory table represents. And while flax is consumed as a food, it is also used by humans to make fabric like damasks, lace, and bed sheets. It is used to make twine and rope. Some nations print their currency on paper made from flax. The oil, sometimes called linseed oil, is used in a wide variety of products, from nutritional supplements to wood-finishing products. There is literally no end to the gifts that flax and flax seeds offer to humans and I suspect we are not done receiving those gifts.

All learning starts as a sensory experience. Playing with flax seed, or anything, is how we begin to understand and appreciate it. The lessons we learn may not lead to new innovations or inventions, but the act of allowing the world to enter us through our senses, to process those sensations, to make connections between other sensations both past and in the future is where learning begins. Even dry lectures must enter our bodies through our ears and eyes. 

Neuroscientist Malcom MacIver believes that when fish began to adapt to life on land some 400 million years ago, they found themselves in a place where they could see over vast distances compared to life in water. This sensory discovery, he says, spurred the evolution of the ability to be proactive, to think ahead, to plan instead of simply react. As their environment expanded, so did their minds. This is what happens when we play with our world with our senses: it expands our minds.

There was never a single superpowered Homo sapiens who encountered flax then sat down and noodled out all the things it could be used for: the history of the relationship between flax and humans is one of playing together. Humans learned to make paper and fabric and food with flax by playing with it, which is to say exploring it with all of our senses, letting it enter into our bodies where our minds could begin guiding the process of experimenting, testing, inventing, and expanding our environment. Both humans and flax have thrived through playing together. And there are some, like historian Yuval Noah Harari, who assert that grains like flax domesticated us rather than the other way around.

When we plunge our hands into 50 pounds of flax seed, we are filling ourselves through our senses. We are activating our curiosity and playfulness. All learning starts with a sensory experience.

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Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Radical Acts of Hope

In the past month, I've had the honor of keynoting two large early childhood gatherings -- the CAAEYC state "Cultivating Relationships" conference in Pasadena and the Alberta Family Childcare Association's "You Make a Difference" conference in Calgary. I relish the opportunity to be on the big stage where I hope to inspire early childhood educators, to make them laugh, cheer, and reflect on their vital work. But what makes these weekends special is the mingling, those moments in the hallways, over meals, and in the coffee lines, connecting over the thing that makes our work universal: the children.

I've had the privilege of doing this with ECEs from all over the world -- China, Greece, Vietnam, Australia, Kazakhstan, Iceland -- and everywhere I go, no matter the geography, culture or political system, I find myself swept up in the essential and eternal commitment, love, and unbridled optimism that characterizes the people who dedicate their lives to our youngest citizens. Perhaps our's is simply a profession that attracts these relentlessly hopeful people, but I think it just as likely that we are the product of working with young children.

Of course, we complain. Of course, we face challenges. Of course, we are bone tired at the end of the day. Of course, we despair over the state of education, of society, and of the world. That's only natural for anyone paying attention. But the blessing of working with young children is that they are a constant and profoundly persuasive reminder of the essential goodness and capacity of humanity. It makes us hopeful in a world that despairs. That is our superpower.

Every single day, we are witness to the kind of "progress" that contradicts the gloom of cynics. We are there as these young humans pick themselves up when they fall; do things that frustrated them only yesterday; show us how to take comfort and derive strength from one another; and find joy in the smallest of things. 

These women, and it's mostly women, know what it is to spend their days immersed in the only thing that really matters at the end of the day, making a difference and cultivating relationships. These gatherings always feel like celebrations of picking ourselves up, persevering, learning, and growing. We shake our fists together at the powers that be, at those who would rob children of their childhoods in the name of test scores, and who seem ignorant of what stands at the core of life itself.

As I mingle, I hear stories of courage and subversion (in the best sense of that word), about standing up to bureaucrats, pushing back against school boards, convincing policy makers, swaying elections, and challenging authority of all kinds. And just as often, there are stories of compassion, patience, and coming together, of dropping to our knees to wipe a runny nose or gather a child into the hug they need.

In a world that worships fame, power, and money, our very existence is revolutionary.

I am honored to be included in this sisterhood. I'm honored each time a child trusts me enough to allow me to pick them up when they're crying. I'm honored by the warmth of their tears on my shoulder. We know that the world simply could not function without us, even if the world itself is blithely unaware, or even dismissive.

Inspired by young children, we pick ourselves up, we persevere, and we do what's right even if it means breaking the rules. This is what unifies ECEs no matter where we are. These are the radical acts of hope that unite us across cultures and oceans.

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Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

The Lefty Who Threw Me Curveball

Throughout my youth and into adulthood I played and coached baseball. 

Like about 90 percent of the other players, I am right handed, which meant I threw the ball right-handed and batted from the right side of the plate. When I was a young, adults often tried to "teach" natural lefties to be righties: the world was built around right-handedness and the goal was to change the children to fit the world. At Meadowfield Elementary School in Columbia, SC, third graders switched from sitting in chairs at small tables to chair-desks, most of which were designed for right-handers, but there were a couple in our classroom for the left-handers. This was the first time I'd ever seen an accommodation like this, although those poor kids still had to twist their bodies in order to make their cursive writing slant in the proper direction.

Lefties were considered oddballs, almost like special needs children . . . Except when it came to baseball. In baseball, the exoticness of being left-handed was an advantage. It probably didn't make a big difference when we were young, but generally speaking, left-handed batters tend to do better against right-handed pitchers, which most pitchers are. As I got older, the left-handed batting advantage became more pronounced, and since most pitcher were right-handers, left-handedness was at a premium. Today, my Seattle Mariners professional baseball team trots out seven left-handers to bat against right-handed pitching.

One summer during my years in middle school, my Boy's Club baseball team went up against a rival who had a left-handed pitcher. He had a reputation because he could throw a curveball. It has been half a century since I stood at the plate against that kid, but I can still clearly see that first curveball he threw to me. I see it coming toward me, high and outside, then suddenly changing course, dropping down and toward me for a strike. It was such a rare sight that it froze me completely. Theoretically, it should have been easier for me, as a right-hander, to hit, but the sheer impossibility of it stunned me.

I remember the kid. He was scrawny, with long, mousy hair. I didn't know much else about him other than that he had a reputation as a "Hood," which is what we called the kids who smoked cigarettes and skipped classes. At the time, I'd not really put it together, but these were the kids from the "wrong side of the tracks." I don't know about him specifically, but I knew other Hoods, many of whom dropped out of school, or were expelled, before graduating. The word we used for it back then, was "failed." Most of the Hoods from my middle school had simply "disappeared" by the time graduation rolled around. 

Today, of course, I know that these children didn't fail. School, society, and their families had failed them. It probably didn't help that this guy was a lefty, except when he played baseball. Then he was something special.

He had thrown the first left-handed curveball I'd ever seen. I never spoke with him. The only interaction that I can recall is that game and that curveball.

Memory experts tell us that we can do certain things to increase the odds of us remembering something, but enduring memories like this are complex. For whatever reason the conditions were just right for it to stick in my mind like a short video. They say that we tend to change our memories each time we recall them. Maybe this one has been altered beyond all recognition because I've recalled it often over the course of my life. Indeed, it flashes through my mind each time I see or even read about a left-handed pitcher. I see that ball doing something I'd previously thought impossible. I see that kid out there not rubbing it in, but rather looking confident as if fully in his element.

This boy didn't disappear. I know exactly what happened to him. Later that summer, he drowned in the Willamette River. It made the local newspaper. It was discussed on the local radio stations. He had been there with a group of other kids, probably Hoods. The rumor was that alcohol and marijuana were involved. I have no idea if this was true, but it circulated among the adults as a kind of cautionary tale.

Perhaps this memory became fixed for me after the fact. Maybe it's not a memory at all, but rather a kind of trauma response. I'd known old people who had died, but he was the first young person. It shocked me that he wasn't there any more, no longer throwing that curveball that turned so confoundedly toward me. I can't really see his face any more, but I can see his scrawny body, his long hair, and that curveball that did the unexpected.

This boys lives for me in a profound way. He was labeled odd, a lefty, a Hood, but he was extraordinary. I wonder if off the diamond he felt like a failure, but in my mind's eye, he is throwing that curveball, his curveball, in a world that tries to straighten everything out. 

Our job as educators, as adults, is not to make children fit the world, but rather to create a world that fits them. This is the only way we ever discover how extraordinary they are.

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Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!

Learning to Make Decisions

His mother asked him, "Don't you want to go to school?"

He nodded that he did, still smiling. Indeed, he appeared relaxed, almost like he was just taking his time, breathing, pausing before launching into his morning.

"Then let's go," his mother urged, taking a step toward the door, but he still didn't move. She gave me an apologetic look, then turned back to her son, "Are you coming?"

He nodded that he was coming, still smiling, and still not moving toward the door.

"Well, I'm going inside," she said, "It's cold out here. You can come in when you're ready." She shrugged at me as she descended the stairs. The boy looked after her until she was out of his line of sight, then he began scanning the brick face of the building, taking it in as if he had never noticed it before. He looked straight up at the sky. 

There was no reason to rush. In fact, they were early, among the first to arrive. His mother lowered her voice, "I don't know what it is. He loves coming to school. It's all he talks about."

I answered, "It looks to me like maybe he's savoring the moment."

"Maybe that's it," she replied, "but if it is, he's the master of savoring moments. He does this all the time. He did the same thing at the grocery store yesterday. When I ask him what he's waiting for, he tells me he's waiting to know what to do."

I asked her, "Is he waiting for you to tell him what to do or something?"

"Obviously not," she laughed, "You heard me. It's like he's waiting for an inner voice."

By now others were arriving, stepping around him to get through the door. Still he stood, smiling, breathing, waiting for his inner voice.

After several minutes, his mother did what some parenting books suggest: she gave him a choice. "You can walk in by yourself or I can carry you."

In a flash, his sanguineness left him. His body visibly stiffened, his eyes rounded. Then he burst into tears.

Perhaps he had, all along, been submerging his real feelings behind smiling and stillness, but two-year-olds typically don't try to hide their feelings. More likely, it had been his mother's gentle insistence that he make a decision that had suddenly stressed him out.

I think, as adults, with all of our practice making decisions, we tend to forget how very stressful it can be to make decisions, even seemingly small ones. After all, only a few months ago he was a baby. We don't expect babies to make decisions. It's something we must learn how to do. 

And making decisions is stressful. The onus to choose among one or more courses of action is something we must practice. We talk about the impulsivity of young children. If we ask them why they did this or that, they usually can't tell us because there was no point at which they made a decision -- they just reacted according to instinct in the same way they instinctively react to a breast by suckling. But the uniqueness of humanity is that we have developed a kind of consciousness that is capable of ignoring our inner voice and choosing how to behave.

It must be incredibly confusing to be a very young child, stuck between the natural imperative of instincts and the learned social imperative to make decisions. 

In many ways, decision-making can be considered the essence of our lives. 

Of course, we all know the stress of making big decisions, like choosing a university, buying a home, or getting married. Making these decisions are often so stressful that it impacts our eating and sleeping.

On the other hand, most of us have figured out ways to reduce the stress of day-to-day decision-making. One strategy we all use at one time or another is to make a decision once, then stick to it as a way to avoid the stress of on-the-spot decision-making. We call these habits. It is stressful, however, when something happens to thwart us. We choose a brand at the supermarket and stick to it, but are thrown for a small loop when our favorite is out of stock. We make schedules, then get stressed out when something comes up. We're suddenly made anxious when our normal route to work is blocked by construction. Even our little decisions, and the gyrations we go through around them, shape our lives, often profoundly.

Young children have not learned the trick of habits and so are forever faced with decisions that we consider inconsequential. No wonder they cry.

There is only one way to learn to make decisions and that is through practice. This is why play is so important for young children. It is the mechanism by which children can grapple with the dilemma of decision-making. Through play, we learn, in a relatively safe way, about the consequences of our decisions, we learn how to consider others in our decision-making, we figure out those habits that make our lives less stressful, and also what to do when our expectations are thwarted. 

There is pain, fear, and loss: these are the stressors we share with all living things. But the stress of decision-making is ours alone. And it is our blessing and our curse.

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Even the most thriving play-based environments can grow stale at times. I've created this collection of my favorite free (or nearly free) resources for educators, parents, and others who work with young children. It's my gift to you! Click here to download your own copy and never run out of ideas again!

I put a lot of time and effort into this blog. If you'd like to support me please consider a small contribution to the cause. Thank you!