Curious Movement: Why a restless child is not always misbehaving

In this episode we explore curiosity. Is a restless child misbehaving or are they asking for help? Children’s natural curiosity and desire to move are often stifled by adult expectations and structured environments. While structured learning is important, it’s crucial to find ways to incorporate movement and exploration into the classroom to support children’s learning and development. By protecting the space for wonder and allowing children to engage with the world around them, we can foster a love for learning and a deeper understanding of the world.

Movement is a natural and essential part of a child’s learning process, serving as a gateway to curiosity and engagement. Rather than suppressing movement, educators should create environments that allow for meaningful physical engagement, recognizing that it can enhance focus and memory. By embracing a child’s biological drive to explore, we can foster a lifelong connection to wonder and discovery.

As always I appreciate your time, hope you find something here that starts a conversation. 

Until next time, Try ~ AdJuSt ~ Try Again

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:04

Welcome to the Movement Sherpa Podcast. I'm Chris, a physical educator, author, and lifelong student of movement. Every week, I explore different facets of the movement world, not to improve athletic skills, but to expand the understanding of the language of movement, with the core belief that movement is for everyone. At some point, an adult, anywhere in the world, and regardless of language, will utter one of these three phrases to a child. And it is important to note the child does not have to belong to said adult. Put that down, don't touch that, and most certainly get off of that. Each utterance will also be accompanied by a different tone depending on how many times said adult has asked. As adults, we are incredibly quick to interrupt the curiosity of a child before we even stop to ask what they're trying to discover. It's easy to say we do it to keep hands clean, to avoid breaking something, or to prevent an accident. We worry about social norms, about breaking rules, or simply going somewhere they're not supposed to go. As our children grow, it's as if society expects curiosity to be replaced by purpose and direction. Or is it that as adults, we've buried our curiosity with responsibility. Nature has a funny way of peeling those responsibilities back, though. Suddenly we are driven by some unknown force to jump into a fresh pile of leaves or make a fallen log the path thus taken. Or thread through a lazy stream on a patchwork of stones and sandbars. Nature dissolves the routes we're expected to take. Hallways become trails, sidewalks become riverbeds, and the expected path gives way to exploration. As adults, we've adapted, or maybe simply accepted, a world built around hallways and office buildings, sidewalks and stop signs. Too often, too many of us spend our days contained, chaotically organized, if you will, and sedentary. And we take for granted our ability to sit still in our own minds for hours. But children haven't made peace with staying still. Sitting quietly inside four walls isn't what their bodies are asking for, regardless of our intentions. Yet adults are often surprised or even frustrated when a child can't seem to stay in their seat. Worse comes the dreaded B word. I'm bored. We often hear those words as defiance or a lack of gratitude, but sometimes there's something else entirely. Sometimes a child isn't misbehaving at all. They're simply struggling to put a feeling into words. What they're really saying is, I need something to discover. I need somewhere to move. I need something to wonder about. You see, movement is a child's primary antenna for the world around them. And and when a child reaches out or climbs up or leaps off of something, they aren't doing it out of malice. Trust me, no matter how many times you have to review the rules with the child, to the child the rules often seem more like a suggestion. When we peel back the hallways and the sidewalks and the expected paths of everyday life, something changes. Suddenly, we're climbing over fallen logs and turning over rocks and wandering just to see what's around the next corner. Maybe even discovering parts of ourselves we've forgotten. Today, we're looking at how movement drives curiosity, why we're so quick to interrupt it in our kids, and how we can protect the natural instinct both at home and in the classroom. I want to start with our park. Less than a mile from our house is a park that has become part of my family's story. My wife spent countless hours there as a child, and now, decades later, our own children are making memories in the very same place. There are tennis courts, hiking trails, a playground, and enough open space for a fantastic disc golf course. But if you ask my kids where they want to go, there's never a debate. They don't hesitate. They make a beeline for the creek. There's one of those memory-making bridges where we always stop to play poo sticks. A tradition I am oddly proud of to have passed on. It's a wonderfully simple game that Winnie the Pooh made famous. To play, you drop a stick into moving water from one side of the bridge, and then see which stick was first to appear on the other side. See what I mean when I say simple? The game is fun, but equally as fun is finding the perfect sticks. Of course, the search is constantly interrupted by discoveries, you know, bugs, neat rocks, feathers, and frogs. Every few steps there's something that grabs their attention. They will ask questions and move past their comfort zones. It's like curiosity leads them where they didn't even plan on going. This is one of those incredible moments where I can get down to their level. I get to see what they're pointing at. I get to experience the moment with them instead of telling them what I want them to see. I watch as they pick things up and clear away the dirt, revealing their discovery. There's also another side to spending time in the park. It's about letting children be children. Not by turning them loose and hoping nature sorts everything out, not by letting them become feral, but by walking alongside them, you know, allowing this curiosity to lead the way. And so what happens is what was once put that down now becomes wow, look what you found. Um, you know, don't touch that. It becomes let's take a closer look and get off of that. Becomes, I've got you, let's see if you can do it safely. You know, it the boundaries don't disappear. It's that the conversation changes. It's not the only exploration of curiosity that children need, but here they can interact with the world around them at the speed of their curiosity and not at the speed of expectation. Children don't need us to manufacture wonder, they've got that on their own. What they need is for us to protect the space where wonder can happen. From the park, we now turn our attention towards the classroom. While the season of summer still has about two months before it gives way to fall, in less than two weeks, school will start again. In fact, teachers are already back in the building now. But before we go any further, it's worth acknowledging something that I think is important. And I don't want the message to get confused. As enriching and free as my time with the kids in the park is, the other learning, the structured learning happens inside the classroom. Close your eyes. Be honest with yourself. How many children do you feel you could keep your attention on at one time? How many times do you think you could handle hearing your name get called? My favorite question. At what noise level do you think you would snap? You see, classroom teachers perform an incredible balancing act uh every single school day. Imagine 25 to 30 children, each bringing their questions, their energy, and all the curiosity in the world, and they all bring it into the same room. The classroom teacher's job isn't simply to teach reading, science, and math and history, it's to somehow channel all of those questions, all that energy, all that movement and wonder into an environment where every student can learn. And all this time while asking the student to spend a majority of their time at a desk. The challenge is that curiosity doesn't disappear when a child walks through the classroom door, and neither does their need to move. The same child who will spend an afternoon playing in a park and jumping on rocks will be the same kid the next morning and they've still full of energy and still full of curiosity. But now that curiosity has to share space with schedules, with lessons and the needs of 25 to 30 other children. This reality makes me think about childhood behaviors, especially as a teacher and a parent. For example, I know I can't take my eight-year-old son to a scientific lecture and expect him to sit quietly for an hour, even if the topic is dinosaurs. And he loves dinosaurs. But if I were to take that same child to a museum, suddenly he's moving from exhibit to exhibit, he's stopping, he's asking questions, he's explaining the dinosaurs to me. He's making all kinds of connections. You see, the movement isn't distracting him from learning, the movement is actually how he's learning. Now that doesn't mean every child needs to be pacing the floor or bouncing off the walls to learn. You know, there's no single magic movement that unlocks focus for every kid. Movement exists on a spectrum. What grounds one child might overstimulate another. You see, it's not about forcing a specific type of motion, it's about observing how individual kids interact with their environment and giving them the space to find out what helps them process the world. The key isn't how much they're moving, it's it's about recognizing that physical engagement, in whatever form it takes, is a doorway to curiosity. And that's that brings us back to the classroom. I sometimes wonder if we're asking children to learn in ways that conflict with how they naturally explore. You know, the challenge isn't that children are moving, the challenge is we've built environments where movement is treated as the enemy of attention rather than one of the pathways to it. Maybe the question isn't how we get children to stop moving. I don't know. Maybe the question is how we create spaces where movement has, you know, a purpose or a place. And I mean, I don't think that it requires a total overhaul. I think it can be as simple as flexible seating, movement-based problem solving, uh, brain breaks, or simply allowing a student to stand at the back of the classroom, walk back and forth, and read. I remember when my son was in kindergarten, I went to a parent-teacher conference, and what stuck out to me the most was the teacher's surprise that my son didn't want to stay in his seat. My son is very kind, but also incredibly curious and will ask question after question after question. And part of it is because he had gone to an incredible pre-K program with multiple languages and cultures filled with music and art. And we were very fortunate that he got into the pre-K he did. So it kind of strikes me as odd that his teacher was so concerned about his inability to sit still. Because my only response was, yeah, he's a little boy. And I I struggle with this because I don't know if we're expecting too much out of our kindergartners. I don't remember my kindergarten being so academically focused. For me, I remember more tactile, more curiosity-focused schooling. Oh, and as I think about her concerns about him in a his inability to sit in his seat, I feel like it's easy to look at a child's restlessness as, you know, it could be a behavioral problem or a lack of discipline. You know, children aren't simply driven to move because they have extra energy. That's an old wives' tale. We see a child struggling to sit down, and immediately we assume, ah, too much sugar. But reality is a lot more nuanced than that. A child's movement can reflect curiosity, it can reflect excitement, or simply the way they're engaging with the world around them. But there is another side to this conversation, and anybody who has spent time with a classroom full of children understands that movement is very contagious. One child gets up to sharpen a pencil, or one child gets up to get a sip of water, and next thing you know, it will be child after child after child. Someone starts tapping a pencil, you'll have an entire percussion section. Someone else starts talking, it is like a room full of copycats. But this is where we have to recognize the incredible challenge teachers face. They aren't asking children to sit still because they don't value curiosity. They're creating the structure that allows these 25 to 30 different children to learn together. And the question isn't whether children should move or whether they should be still. I think the question is when does movement help learning? And when does movement pull us away from it? So, what does the science tell us? What does the science say about curiosity? And uh I think it's fascinating, really. I'm gonna try to do this without being too academic or too scientific, but uh what I've what I've gathered is that we, you know, adults, we tend to think of curiosity as something that happens entirely in the mind. But when you shift the look to a child, you know, curiosity is is the full body experience. Movement is literally how they you know, that's how they how their brain gathers data. Um tucked inside our inner ear is something known as our vestibular system. In case you don't know, the vestibular system is responsible for uh us keeping our balance. And for a child, this vestibular system also is helpful when a child you know changes their perspectives. Um, every time a child leans over something, hangs upside down on something, and tilts their head and moves in a funny way, it's as these these things happen, as these movements occur, that vestibular system feeds the brain like a rapid stream of information uh to receive uh dopamine release. But unlike the the quick, effortless dopamine spikes a child will get from you know from screens like doom scrolling, the dopamine that you get fired off from nature works entirely differently. You know, on a screen, our brain gets passive, rapid fire hits that eventually drain our focus and overstimulate our system. But when you shift to outside nature moving, the the dopamine is actually earned through movement and and active discovery. And it's uh you know, when you stand on an unstable rock, when you uh our attention is taken by a strange bug, our brain will fire off that dopamine and it's the biological engine of of seeking, it's the drive that compels a child to reach out, to test the weight of something, to try and climb on something, to pick something up. It's a it's what's defined as a slow burn dopamine. And when you pair that with the sensory feedback and the physical effort, you know, that's what builds our children's focus, their confidence, and their lasting memory. But if we're to interrupt that, if we step in with a quick, don't touch that, or stand still. It's not we're not just interrupting that physical motion. The concern is is that we're interrupting a a feedback loop. It's it's like a a neurological feedback loop. And that that feedback loop is the process by which they take their curiosity and apply it to problem solving, they it's into you know space, spatial confidence and also into real memory. I feel that when we look at the science, when we talk to the teachers, when we share with other parents, I believe that we begin to get a clearer picture that the fidgeting, the climbing, the the reaching, the touching, it's not about misbehavior. It's simply biology. The big picture here isn't about blaming something. It's not the problem, isn't just classrooms, it's not declaring war on sitting still. Because life requires both. We need exploration, curiosity, but we also need the discipline of the desk, right? We need children to learn. I think that the challenge of parents and educators isn't deciding between the two. It's not deciding between order and movement. That's not what we're doing. I think what we're trying to realize is that movement can be one of the bridges to order. When we adults, when we create environments, you know, gymnasiums, classrooms, homes, environments that recognize this biology, this drive to explore, this drive to be restless, I think we're gonna stop seeing it as an obstacle. And when we stop seeing this behavior as this restlessness as something that needs to be stopped, like a fire that's got to be put out, I think we can see that restlessness might be a spark to something that could be redirected. My fear is we allow a child 18 years of being told to put something down, to not touch something, to sit still. Are we really going to be surprised that they're not gonna be adults that want to explore? They won't have as much curiosity to the natural world? I worry that there won't be a generation of people that take the path less traveled. It makes me want to ask you a question. You know, when was the last time you took the path less taken? When was the last time you found yourself finding a curious rock or really stopping to pay attention at some strange bug? You see, protecting a child's space to move isn't just about surviving school. It's you know, it's about ensuring they don't lose their connection to wonder. We we so often think that our job as adults is to teach children how the world works. Maybe so, but maybe our real job is just letting them remind us how to experience it. The question was never how to get our kids to sit still. The question is whether we're brave enough to step into the creek and move along with them. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. This is just a small step into a much larger conversation, and there are so many valid perspectives when it comes to supporting our kids. But maybe that's the best way we can help them by opening up these discussions and taking the time to be curious and understand where everyone is coming from. If you like today's episode, please subscribe. You'll never miss a future episode. I wouldn't complain if you shared it with a friend. Check out the website and send me your questions and comments. That's our journey for today. Do me a huge favor. Go outside and move more because life happens out there. Remember, movement is for everyone. I'm your movement Sherpa, and I'll talk to you next week.