Years ago, we came across an article written by a parent at a Houston Montessori school. In the article, the parent describes Montessori as Libertarian with a capital L. If we are being honest, we would tend to say the article "rationalizes" more than describes.
When children begin to name and then recognize triggers for their emotions, good and bad, they are granted a new superpower. That superpower is self-control. Self-control is critical for development and is the basis for emotional maturity in adulthood. To help children on their path to emotional maturity we are launching the emotion project next week. While our high level goal is to get children thinking about the connections between their actions and emotions, we have a series of long-term goals in mind that will probably align quite well with you as parents.
Free play is something we have endorsed before,. That is – in part – because it is critical to future happiness, emotional development, creativity, social skills, political savvy, curiosity, and self-control. The science is pretty clear on this. Yet it is rare to see children engaged in free play. On the rare occasions where a cluster of children is spotted it tends to be under the supervision of a group leader at one of any number of structured activities. While those activities may be useful in terms of filling in free time, too many of them are detrimental to child development. The outcomes since the early 1980s where the trend toward extracurricular overload began are sad. Increased anxiety and depression are but two of the negative long-term effects. And because of the length and depth of the trend, we are now in an age where many parents never had the chance to enjoy the benefits of free play.
Every once in a while we hear a statement that makes us recoil. That is "Montessori just lets children do whatever they want". We have even heard this from people who would otherwise be trustworthy when it comes to information, people who are generally regarded as cautious prior to reporting information. Unfortunately, on occasion, these people are on platforms that are capable of spreading information - good and bad - very rapidly.
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