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“The child must learn by his own individual activity being given a mental freedom to take what he needs…” — Maria Montessori , To Educate the Human Potential 

When children are first learning to conduct research, books provide many advantages over online searches.

Giving children clear boundaries is the truest form of love and compassion.

This piece was delivered as a “coffee discussion” I led with groups of parents from Forest Bluff School, a Montessori school in Lake Bluff, Illinois, serving children ages 18 months to 14 years old. The purpose of these discussions is to give parents ideas for home and explore how to use Montessori’s helpful approach. Anyone can benefit; I hope you will! What Are We Talking About? Why is “Home”, “Character” and “Turbulent” in the same title?! Before I dive into how we can raise courageous children, I’ll unpack why each word is relevant: Let’s start with the word Character : when parents are polled, overwhelmingly they’ll say they want to raise good people. We have many hopes for our children past this, but sending good people into the world seems to be a widespread and basic, parenting goal. Parents want their children to grow up with what they believe is good character! But character is not a genetic gift, nor is it something handed to a child; rather, it is what we build in ourselves, through our life experiences, through our exposures to what surrounds us. As our children grow, they develop character. And for this, children must have repeated, positive experiences. Consider this word from the title: Turbulent . We are surrounded by turbulence, whether it be personal and immediate, or remote; wars are happening in the world right now, and that is brought into our daily lives by the media and by social media, mainly through our phones that come with us everywhere, right in our pockets. We complain about this constancy and stress, but one of our main characteristics as human beings, is that we care about others! If someone is suffering, we are drawn towards the story. We seem to have an impulse for sharing experiences and a desire to help one another. We think of our fellow human beings, even when we are not with them. Caring about others is a character trait, one we want our children to develop. This development happens in positive early environments. In a Montessori school, the curriculum for elementary children explains that humans have 3 qualities that no other creatures have, which set us apart and makes us unique: we have opposing thumbs which enable us to make complex tools with our hands; we have minds that can think in unique ways; and we have a capacity for love that transcends familiarity, because we can feel love and concerns for people we don’t even know. We often wish other humans well, even from the other side of the earth. There is turbulence, strife, and struggle in every person’s life. Just as when we’re in an airplane, though, turbulence–as rough or as frightening as it may be–does pass in waves. And as with a rough ocean surface, we can maintain a relative calm underneath the surface if we learn how to. Learning to calm ourselves becomes part of us. We learn to do this in childhood. Another part of our title is Home . Your home can be a sanctuary for your family, a place to return to. You can make it a place to build strength, to receive love, to build optimism, and to create positive language for describing the world and describing other people. This can be done in very basic ways. We’re not talking about anything extravagant or difficult. Through your simple actions and attitudes, home can be a place for your children to build the character needed for navigating through life. Three Key Messages Today, I have 3 key messages I’d like to share with you: The first is that although the world is turbulent, you and your children do have choices to exercise, every day. (For specific suggestions about choices for children, moral development and appropriate limit-setting, see several articles here: paulalillardpreschlack.com/my-writing/ ). We want to focus on giving our children micro choices to experience that having choice is freedom. Now, it’s true that in some things, there is no choice! Those are limits, and we need those limits to provide boundaries. But the choices we have in life, including how to behave, and what to think, and how to work with our feelings, are freedoms that go with you everywhere and into every circumstance. No one is powerless. The second is that every family needs a source for their moral values . What is that source for you? Is it religion? If so, how do you share this with your children? Is it the natural world? If so, how do you present the lessons of the natural world to them? Is it family stories of heroic actions, and your heritage? You must have a source, a compass to guide you as a family, and to draw on it. This happens naturally when you make a comment, say a prayer out loud, or tell a little story about your grandparents. And the third message, is that children go through developmental stages when their needs and characteristics differ , so if we want to be effective with our children, we need to adjust our language, our behavior, and our interaction style to match. This fact is a very helpful, central lesson from Dr. Maria Montessori. Here is an anecdote to point out that children–unconsciously by nature–have drives propelling them to develop; ones which we can support if we recognize them. Imagine for a moment that you are standing in a piazza in Rome around the year 1909 and you’re sitting on a bench next to Maria Montessori. Here is what she says: "I once saw in the gardens of the Pincio in Rome, a very beautiful child of about a year and a half. He had an empty bucket and a little spade and was busy collecting pebbles from the path to fill it. Near the smiling child was a distinguished looking nurse, who was obviously well-disposed towards him and who must have been most affectionate and intelligent in her care. It was time to depart, and the nurse patiently entreated the child to leave his work and let himself be placed into his buggy. In the face of the child’s resistance, all her exhortations were of no avail. She finally filled up the pail with gravel herself and then put the gravel and the child in the carriage, certain that she had pleased him. The loud cries of the child indicated that this was not so. His shouts of protest at the violence and injustice which had been done to him struck me . What a weight of resentment filled his heart! The child had not really wanted to fill the pail with gravel; he had simply wanted to carry out the exercise needed to fill it and thus satisfy the needs of his growing body. The end sought by the child was his own inner formation, not the external act of filling a pail with little stones. His lively attachment to the exterior world was only an illusion; his vital need was a reality. Actually, if he had filled the pail, he would probably have emptied it so that he could fill it again many times over until he had completely satisfied himself.…This simple episode is an example of what happens to children all over the world, even to the best and most dearly beloved. They are not understood because adults judge them by their own standards ” (Montessori, The Discovery of the Child, 1967). Do you see how Montessori upends some of our logical adult reactions? If we re-train ourselves to step back, observe and reflect with the lens that each child is trying to do things for themselves, then we can proceed accordingly. Noticing children’s developmental needs in each stage is the key to helping them build their own character. Children of all ages must do things for themselves, again and again. They need to build their bodies to function, and their minds. Through their actions, they build themselves as people. We absolutely cannot do it for them. What we can do is set up the environment, choose what we expose them to, guide them, and set an example by modeling with our own actions, words, and daily lives. Let’s briefly consider just a few needs at each stage of childhood, because these differ between your children’s differing ages. Different Needs for Different Ages Early Childhood: Infants to 5-year-olds Infants and young children need reality and stability, clarity and consistency. They learn from real life experiences, and their understanding comes more easily when we are very literal. For these ages, keep things simple. It’s “black and white” thinking for this early stage. Things are either true or false. Adults are either in charge or they are not, (and they need you to be in charge to feel safe and secure!) Many adults do not realize that very young children absorb fairy tales, scary images, or violence just as easily and automatically as they absorb true stories, love, and how to be kind. Very young children use everything they are exposed to, to form their understandings of the world and their personalities. What we expose them to, impacts them deeply. They need a sense of security with reality, which comes from experiencing the real, material world around them. Some research has shown that young children are confused by fantastical books and screen images, so try to replace these with content from the beautiful natural world around them, and with true stories with heartfelt themes; remember, they are building character! Childhood: Elementary-aged children (6-12 years old) These are the ages when social and moral development becomes a fascination for your children. (And now they can recognize the difference between what is real and what is fantastical; how fun!) At these ages, children need to play and interact with peers. Sometimes, they need to do so without the controlling supervision of adults; this is when elementary-aged children make mistakes, work things out, and really learn how to get along. These are the ages, Maria Montessori observed, for children to study society, culture, and history intensively, because they are so curious about people. While exploring these topics, children need the positive view, such as a Montessori curriculum offers. In the history curriculum, for example, Montessori teachers suggest that we thank the peoples who invented and contributed to our number system, alphabet, clock time, music and arts, the furniture that makes us more comfortable, and so on, in specific stories. Expressing gratitude–in this case towards other societies that have contributed to our lives–becomes a habit. This is also when children learn, perceptively, about forgiveness; the power of an apology, making lots of mistakes, and learning from them. They need to experience, over and over, how to express thoughts and feelings in words, and how to find understanding with another person, through in-person interactions where social cues come through body language, gestures, facial expressions, and voice intonation. Adolescence: Young Adults (ages 12-18) Now the nuance of the “grey areas” in life come to light. For example, you may find a very honest teenager telling a lie if it is to protect a friend, because he chose the code of loyalty over the code for honesty during this stage of his life. These are the ages when children learn that sometimes even adults make poor choices or mistakes, that we’re still learning. Your adolescents don’t need to know everything about your life, but they do need to see you admit your own mistakes now and then, and witness how you remedy these and move forward. You are a living example for them. Adolescents need emotional support and they still need loving limits. But they are clever enough to figure many things out; they do not appreciate lectures and drills, and we get in the way when we try to tell them things. Instead, we parents must conduct ourselves morally and with character, as best we can. You reveal your moral values through your actions. Please note: everything I have described here refers to children and adolescents who are spending almost all of their time interacting with you and other people in real-time, rather than with screens and with social media. (See Jonathan Haidt’s suggestions for appropriate screen time limits in The Anxious Generation, 2024, or his Substack articles in After Babel). Do you see how children learn to be independent from us very gradually, in stages? Montessori reminds us that from the first year of life, children are asking us to help them to accomplish things by their own powers : “The adult must help the child to do things entirely on his own, for if the child does not reach the point of ceasing to rely on the help of adults and become independent, he will never fully mature intellectually or morally” (Montessori, Education and Peace, 1972). Our parenting path is eased when we recognize this. Knowing that our children’s full independence from us is their ultimate goal, which will evolve gradually with freedoms and limits that match each age, enables us to successfully foster their character development. Freedom and Limits For your children of all ages, freedoms, in the form of choices that you offer them, and limits, in the form of boundaries that you keep in firmly in place, create a balance. This balance allows children to develop responsibility in their actions. The choices you give your children–when and where appropriate–help them to build their character by their own powers. When you set a limit, feel confident and secure that you are giving your child what they need to live a very happy life! Life has limits. For example, one requirement in your home might be that everyone pitches in when it’s time to clean up. This sends the message that our children are not honored guests in the home; they are part of the family, important members of the team. Psychologist Jim Fay tells a story where his wife sometimes said, “I’ll help!” when a child seemed discouraged about their chores. One day, Fay heard the children all say, “I’ll help!” when their mother expressed dreading her own household tasks. This creates a culture of being helpful; it builds character! For more about this balance of freedom and limit-setting, see articles at: paulalillardpreschlack.com/my-writing/ Creating a Sanctuary at Home There are physical signals we give our children by how we prepare our homes, and through our actions at home. These can be simple preparations and actions, such as: Lighting a candle. Setting a fire in the fireplace. Settling on the couch to read a book. Looking at the stars and the moon before bed. Reading poetry before starting a meal. Listening to music on a rainy day. Playing a musical instrument in the house. Playing a card or board game together. Making a meal with everyone helping. Sitting together quietly without any distractions to talk to each other! These practices and habits reveal our priorities and values, which our children will witness. Think about your favorite places, and bring your children there regularly. These might be: parks, riversides, lakesides, paths in the woods, open fields, libraries, churches, temples, museums, or someone else’s home. Perhaps these places offer peace and resilience. The books and stories that you share are also sources of values. Repeat the ones that mean the most to you. I highly recommend children’s classics, especially the ones that are timeless. Find suggested book lists for each age here . Very young children appear to love rituals. What are your family rituals? Is it church or temple on Sundays? Or walks in the woods as a family? Cooking a meal together? Playing a game every Saturday night? Is it reading together at bedtime every night? Every day, you are building habits with your family. They can be minimal and simple; anything you can manage to do matters. Putting all the screens, phones and smartwatches away so that we have times without distractions is a key element to building healthy habits and empowering our children to build their own characters. Optimism for the Future What has helped me to step away from the turbulence of stressful news going on all around us, is diving into my bookshelf and enveloping myself in certain themes of thought, listening to great thinkers while driving, reading interesting books, and talking to people about meaningful ideas. This gives me a better understanding of what is happening in the world today, and renewed hope for the future. Here are a few takeaways from some favorites on my bookshelf: The Road to Character by David Brooks: “The essential drama of life is to construct character, which is an engraved set of disciplined habits, a settled disposition to do good.” How Children Succeed by Paul Tough: When [conventional] educators try to teach character, they are largely ineffective. Studies have shown no significant impact at all from such programs, not on student behavior, academic achievement, or school culture. However, here is what does matter: self-discipline scores are a better predictor of academic and life success than IQ or GPAs. In sum, willpower matters! The Marshmallow Test by Walter Mischel: The ability to distract oneself is key. This is an ability we build in childhood and rehearse in adulthood. It’s really about attending to what one chooses to prioritize. Where we direct our attention makes all the difference. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Illuminating the Path to Happiness by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: “How we feel about ourselves, the joy we get from living, ultimately depends directly on how the mind filters and interprets everyday experiences.” Exercising one’s thinking habits to control where our thoughts go, leads directly to happiness. I leave you with these questions to ponder: What did you learn from your own parents growing up? How did your home life prepare you for the outside world you later faced? What do you hope to pass on to your children?

This is the final installment of our spring blog series, Montessori and Executive Functioning. In Part I , we learned how a Montessori education helped Forest Bluff alumni to develop skills such as sustained attention, task initiation, organization, time management, and planning/prioritization . In Part II , alumni share how their schooling contributed to the development of their response inhibition, working memory, emotional control, flexibility, and goal-directed persistence . In Part III, the role of metacognition is discussed. Metacognition: the ability to consider and evaluate one’s own thinking processes Over the course of the creation of this piece, I had the opportunity to speak to many Montessori alumni. I was struck by how, after seeing the list of traits, each one could so easily speak about their executive functioning skills. Every single one was able to choose a topic to discuss. And despite being in the middle of exams, or homework, or their own full lives, they were able to share organized and concise thoughts about their thinking processes, whether it was task initiation, goal-directed persistence, sustained attention, or any of the executive functioning skills. In this way, every alumni I interviewed displayed fluency with metacognition. They considered their thinking processes, and developed articulate and thoughtful analyses of their cognitive abilities. Not only were they able to consider these processes in the present, but they also were able to reflect on their childhood experiences, and relate their current thinking patterns to their Montessori education. Perhaps this is the invitation for me to reveal that I, too, am a Montessori alumni. I deeply appreciate the importance of metacognition. Without an understanding of our thinking processes, we cannot properly evaluate where we need more support, or how to individually structure projects so that we have the best chance of success given our strengths and weaknesses. As I observed during my interview with the young woman about sustained attention, executive functioning traits do not simply exist fully formed in every person. Instead, we need to understand which tools to use when in order to fully utilize our skills. Metacognition makes this possible. Montessori uniquely provides an environment for developing metacognition. From a very young age, students are making choices and living with the consequences of those choices, giving themselves opportunities to assess their decisions and their approaches to their work. When they are very little, this process is implicit. But after the age of six, they record their work in a work journal—their entries becoming more elaborate and specific as they mature—and then they have a weekly meeting with their teacher where they consider their work progress, and make plans for what they’d like to accomplish in the coming week. This cycle of freedom and reflection gives students the space to experiment with their work habits, and then assess how it went under the guidance of a trained teacher. They are not simply told what they did right or wrong. They are part of a regular conversation that considers their individual strengths and weaknesses, and then they are given the liberty to begin their next week with new ideas of how to accomplish the work they’d like to accomplish. This lays the foundation for metacognition. Final Thoughts As I read through the conversations I had with each of these students and parents, I see three important themes. Freedom and Responsibility First, the balance of freedom and accountability (or responsibility, as the Montessori language often uses) is a foundational element for almost every single skill related to executive functioning. Perhaps obviously, in order to develop the ability to make good choices and plans, a person needs a lot of practice making good choices and plans, preferably starting in their childhood. They need to choose what to work on and how to work on it, and also have the space to make mistakes and learn from their choices. Then they need the freedom to choose it again, and to do it differently next time. No matter how many choices a conventional school introduces to the day, it is virtually impossible for them to replicate the intricate and widespread presence of freedom and accountability in the Montessori curriculum. This is partially because it is not enough to simply give the children freedom. They also need specific, regular, and natural opportunities to get feedback on their decisions, whether they learn from the materials, their peers, or conversations with their teacher. They have to have the freedom to make choices, and the necessary structure to learn from those choices. This is how executive functioning skills flourish. A Cohesive and Comprehensive Curriculum Second, Dr. Montessori’s cohesive curriculum supports executive functioning through an entire childhood—from the time the tiny toddler enters the Young Children’s Community until the long-limbed adolescent plans for a semester-long independent study project and prepares a meal for their entire class without a teacher’s help. It does this by gradually expanding the size of the projects while giving children organic checkpoints to assess their decisions and projects. One mother who I spoke to observed the ways this takes place throughout the years: It goes all the way back to the YCC and the Primary because the children are choosing their own work then, too. They may get out a lengthy activity like table washing right before the end of the day. They set it up and then see their classmates cleaning up their work. They experience the trial and error of what fits into the time they have at their disposal. In the Primary, they choose their activities and fill their time. In the Elementary, they record the time it takes to do work and reflect on it. Then in the Secondary Level, they make plans for the future. The children do so many long term projects in Montessori. They not only experience what they did during a certain day, but they also have to manage how to get through a long project. Are they keeping up with their friends who are working on the same project? Are they staying on track for the goals they set for themselves? There’s a constant juxtaposition between the large scale work period and the smaller scale work periods. These larger scale work periods and smaller scale work periods are an essential element of the Montessori curriculum. Learning to navigate this balance over the years creates an important foundation for executive functioning. Celebrating Individuality Finally, and perhaps most significantly, is the respect that Montessori has for the extraordinary individuality of every human being. It not only acknowledges it and supports it, but it also recognizes that our world needs human beings with profoundly different strengths. These executive functioning skills do not all exist fully formed in 8th grade Montessori graduates. The seeds have been planted, so to speak, but it will take time for them all to flourish. Montessori does not produce or polish or make anything in graduates. The academic and holistic curriculum gives children the gifts of deeply rooted awareness, confidence, and experience as autonomous beings with goals. But, given that every person is an individual with unique strengths and challenges, they all will come to the impressive executive functioning that Montessori promises in their own time. Similarly, each skill will show up uniquely in each person. One graduate will exhibit “sustained attention” in a different way from another graduate. In my interview, our sophomore college student sustains her attention through organization and motivation. Someone else might use other habits to arrive at the same place. The beauty of Montessori is that it provides just enough structure for a person to keep building their own scaffolding as they grow into the world and develop their own habits and goals. The alumni mother who I spoke to shared her thoughts on this: “It is unusual for a system of education to simultaneously indulge personality discrepancies and also correct for weaknesses. Montessori doesn’t extinguish divergences in students. It allows us to hold on to the best parts of what made us all different while also holding us accountable for the ways we needed to be productive and accomplished.” Truly, the goal of a Montessori education is not to produce graduate after graduate who all exhibit the same executive functioning skills in the same way. It is to elevate natural strengths and help provide structure and support for challenges. It is to maintain the individuality of each student, and preserve their confidence and love of learning, while also allowing them to develop the tools necessary to thrive in the world. The goal of a Montessori education is to sustain a reverence for the dignity of every human being, and provide a path for each of them to offer their own essential gifts to the unfolding of the universe. References Guare, R., Dawson, P., & Guare, C. (2013). Smart but Scattered Teens. The Guilford Press. Moffitt, T., Arseneault, L., Belsky, D., Dickson, N., Hancox, R., Harrington, H., Houts, R., Poulton, R., Roberts, B., Ross, S., Sears, M., Thomson, W., & Caspi, A. (2011). A gradient of childhood self-control predicts health, wealth, and public safety. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(7), 2693-2698. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1010076108 Randolph, J., Bryson, A., Menon, L., Henderson, D., Manuel, A., Michaels, S., Rosenstein, D., McPherson, W., O'Grady, R., & Lillard, A. (2023). Montessori education's impact on academic and nonacademic outcomes: A systematic review. Campbell Systematic Reviews, 19(3). https://doi.org/10.1002/cl2.1330