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Brief excerpts from Optimal Parenting—Using Natural Learning Rhythms to Nurture the Whole Child

Capacities are innate; development occurs in relationship. The connections among the people in the child’s life, and primarily between parent and child, determine the degree of excellence and well-being in the maturation of the capacities. What are the capacities of children of different ages? How can they be recognized?

And critically, what kinds of environments nourish optimal development of each capacity? These are questions that every parent, teacher, and child-oriented professional yearns to answer. They wish to be able to recognize the child’s capacities and respond to them to ensure optimal well-being. Is this possible? Yes! When we ask the right questions, the door opens. But do the answers require complex academic training to understand? Does their implementation require professional skills? No!

Remarkably, the door opens to an intuitively satisfying appreciation of children that requires no extensive training to understand and act on.

This appreciation—this world that lies beyond the open door—is described by Natural Learning Rhythms. Succinctly stated, NLR maps the development of the innate capacities in children and offers guidelines to creating relationships that lead to optimal well-being. Natural Learning Rhythms goes beyond just safeguarding the child and making sure they become productive or creative members of society. The program helps each family member hit their notes at just the right time, so that the family and the community can be creative and inspiring.

On optimal well-being
What is this silver bullet? What is this “thing” we finally see that was there all the time and was implicit in so much of the study of children?

What is this key that opens the door into the child’s organization of reality?

It is the realization that each life stage has an organizing principle.

The organizing principle is inherent and lives as a faculty in every human. There are no exceptions. It organizes all activities toward the best expression of health and wholeness available; i.e., optimal wellbeing.

Like a vibrant river, well-being moves through the mind and body of the child.

On Spirituality
It may sound simple, but the doorway to optimal well-being is just this: Nourish the organizing principle and optimal well-being, including spiritual development, follows. Relationship and the organizing principle are hand-in-hand. Only the parent or teacher in relationship to the organizing principle can understand it and nourish it. Health and vibrancy in the organizing principle guarantee access to wisdom, which is so important for spiritual awareness.

On the Dance
Properly responding to the expressions of the organizing principle in young people precipitates a simultaneous development in adults. This relationship serves the deepest development of both children and adults. It is a dance of reciprocal growth toward self-knowledge. It is a vital example of opportunities naturally built into the developmental moment. Recognition of the dance can change chauvinism toward children, for the child’s importance for the self-actualization of the adult is unmistakable.

On Remedies and Family Reunification
There is no standing outside well-being; there is no learning about it. Remedies, for this reason, must always embrace the whole family. Reunification emerges through family participation.

Natural Learning Rhythms remedies, designed to dissolve the blocks to well-being, allow families to emerge as unities. Their path is then undetermined. They can continue to emerge, regenerate, and realize themselves as more complex unities. This dance need never end.

Therefore, reunification wisely insists that the restoration of wellbeing reside in the relationships among family members. They must co-evolve. No part of the system can be isolated.

On Social Justice
An important question for social justice arises. Who can see the importance of family as the source of society’s emotional well-being? Who can rally perhaps the most extensive social reform in history so that education and resources are abundantly allocated to family support and thus establish emotional well-being as the social norm? The answer to these questions, I believe, begins with appreciating the societal contributions of children. Those children who experience themselves as socially valuable throughout their childhood have the greatest likelihood of facilitating the transition to a socially just world. It will not be children who are seen only for the contribution they might make as adults or for their ability to learn cultural customs and skills. Such chauvinism sees the child as an adult-in-the-making, not a child-as-she-is. It will be children seen as they are, whose social importance is acknowledged in each moment of their lives, that will bring about the transformation of the family for maximum social good.