Anyone with a child has experienced the bouncy energy that begins before birth and morphs to crawling, jumping, skipping and running. Freedom of movement is a requirement of development, without it, our muscles atrophy and become slack and weak. The connection is more than physical as research has shown the brain development in children who are confined to cribs in early childhood is curtailed and difficult to make up for.
Walk into any great classroom and see students moving, from activity to activity, from indoors to out, from activities that may involve groups or solo tasks or gardens. Movement is an integral part of most progressive forms of education and to a healthy childhood. As a physician and child development specialist, Maria Montessori knew that children’s minds and bodies require movement in order to develop. This movement helps them to grow and to concentrate. Movement helps to integrate learning in the mind, it helps to free the mind to think and make meaning of all it perceives. Children (and adults) evolved to move with their feet and work with their hands.
In The Secret of Childhood, Montessori wrote, “Movement, or physical activity, is thus an essential factor in intellectual growth, which depends upon the impressions received from outside. Through movement, we come in contact with external reality, and it is through these contacts that we eventually acquire even abstract ideas.” Take some time to move and to encourage movement for your child. Model a less stationary lifestyle that includes less sitting and more walking, and your child will be a mover and shaker well into his or her own adulthood.