Montessori education places great importance on caring for and preserving our natural resources and the planet, and there is no better place to begin than in your own family life. In a Montessori-inspired home, spending time outside together is one of the simplest and most valuable things you can do. It strengthens your relationship with your child, and it helps him develop a real, lasting sense of connection to the natural world, one that may eventually grow into a genuine commitment to caring for it. Research consistently shows that children who spend regular time in nature tend to be calmer and more grounded than children who spend most of their time indoors with digital devices.

As a family, time outdoors is enjoyable, good for both physical and mental health, and often costs little or nothing at all. Most children love bringing home small treasures after a walk around the backyard, an afternoon at the local park, or a hike in the woods. If you have the space, consider setting up a nature area at home for displaying and collecting these finds. It can be as simple as a small table for photographs and objects, or as elaborate as an aquarium or terrarium for the bugs, beetles, frogs, and turtles your child brings home for a short visit before returning them to where they were found.

Every season brings something new to discover. If you live near a secluded beach, you and your child might find horseshoe crab eggs in the sand, and with a magnifying glass you can see the miniature crabs developing inside. Photographing the eggs each day until they hatch can become a wonderful shared project, and it teaches an important lesson about patience and care: not disturbing the process, and eventually letting the creatures go, the same way you would release a butterfly or a frog. Summer is an ideal time to gather and compare flowers, counting petals and stamens, or pressing flowers and leaves into a small scrapbook. Fall usually brings an abundance of fruits, nuts, and berries, and finding out which animals rely on them for food can become its own small adventure.

It helps to gather a few simple tools for your outings together: a magnifying glass, a bug box or jar, and a small field guide for identification. You might even sew or assemble your own collecting bag to carry them in.

As your child grows older, she may enjoy keeping a nature journal, whether written, photographic, or filled with drawings. A digital journal can even include short video clips tracking the passage of the weeks and months in your garden, from the day you plant your first basil seeds to the fully grown plant. Teaching your child to draw what she sees in nature is a wonderful, nearly lost skill worth reviving. People have long noticed that the act of drawing something forces us to notice small details we would otherwise miss. Encourage older children to write poems or short stories that capture their own sense of wonder, and to photograph everything from a sweeping landscape to a single leaf brought home for the nature shelf.

One simple way to build your child’s powers of observation is to go outside together, choose a single spot in your yard, and spend five quiet minutes really looking at it. Afterward, talk, write, or draw about what you noticed. Ask specific questions: What colors did you see in the grass? Did you spot any insects? What sounds did you hear?

If you have the room, a raised garden bed makes it much easier for a child to work comfortably alongside you, sitting on the ground or on a small stool while learning to plant and weed. We encourage families to try growing an organic garden, free of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, and perhaps to build or buy a small composting bin or even start a simple worm farm. Add a butterfly garden, and imagine the wonder on your child’s face, and the lift in everyone’s spirits, the first time real butterflies begin visiting your backyard. Add a few plants that attract hummingbirds, along with some bird and hummingbird feeders, and, once you have worked out how to keep the squirrels from raiding them, which is a small lesson in persistence all its own, you will have the quiet magic of songbirds, hummingbirds, and butterflies right outside your door.

Whether your family loves gardening, walking in the park, hiking in the woods, or simply observing the world up close in your own backyard, time spent together outdoors is good medicine for the soul.

Out and About: Infants, Toddlers, and Young Children (Birth to Age Five)

From birth to about eighteen months, infants need a great deal of hands-on care. They must be fed, carried or wheeled from place to place, dressed, and changed throughout the day. All of this can make leaving the house feel daunting, but with a little thoughtful planning, it becomes far more manageable.

Every baby is different. Some adapt easily to changes in routine, while others find any disruption difficult. Either way, there will be times parents simply need to take their infant along, whether for an essential doctor’s appointment, a trip to the grocery store, or just a change of scenery on a day when staying home has started to feel isolating.

In a Montessori-inspired home, parents try to show their child respect, empathy, and consideration from birth onward, in even the smallest daily decisions. Planning ahead before an outing is one simple way to put that respect into practice, making the experience as comfortable and pleasant as possible for everyone involved.

Before heading out with an infant, it can help to ask yourself a few questions. Why are you going out: is the trip necessary, or is it for pleasure? Whose needs will it meet, yours, your baby’s, or both?

If the outing is not essential, a few more questions are worth considering. Where will you go, and what will the weather be like? How long will it take to get there? How will you travel? What time will you arrive, and how does that line up with feeding and nap times? Will there be a place to feed and change your child once you arrive? What will you actually do while you’re there? Is this outing well suited to your child’s age? And how will you recognize the signs that your little one has had enough, whether that’s fussiness, or simply losing interest?

Once you’ve thought through these questions, you can prepare yourself and your child for whatever the outing calls for, whether it’s a short walk around the neighborhood or a longer trip to somewhere like the zoo.

Toddlers and young children up to age five often enjoy outings such as playdates at the park, time on a playground, picnics, or a morning at Sunday school or a parent-and-child class. This is often the age when children first begin to venture a little way from their parents, drawn to another child or a piece of play equipment. It’s important to keep a close eye on them for safety, while still allowing them the feeling of real independence. Most toddlers will wander a short distance and then circle back, just to make sure you’re still there. This is also the age when parents begin teaching the basics that will matter for years to come: staying within sight, holding hands to cross the street, and taking turns with other children.

A word about large amusement parks: a big, crowded park can be a genuinely difficult outing for an infant, toddler, or even a child between three and six. Little ones get hungry, thirsty, tired, or need the bathroom at the least convenient moments, and a day meant to be fun can quickly turn into a struggle for everyone. A smaller, closer option is often the better choice: a neighborhood park costs little or nothing, lets you head home the moment your child is ready, and usually offers exactly what a young family needs, whether that’s swings and slides or simply open space to run.

For younger children, a zoo, a petting farm, or a smaller, less overwhelming park can be entertaining without becoming overstimulating, and often offers a bit of learning along the way. A dinosaur-themed park, for example, with large models to explore, an area for digging up “bones,” and a shaded picnic spot, gives a young child a gentle, guided introduction to a new subject, built around movement, discovery, and rest in just the right proportions.

Many parents notice this behavior even when a child is doing something small. Perhaps they’re building with blocks. Maybe a story is being read aloud. Or they might be drawing or painting a picture on their own. For a couple of minutes or possibly longer, the room is silent. Then someone calls out from down the hall. One of their siblings walks past. A parent checks their cell phone. A toy near them suddenly plays music. The child stops whatever they’re engaged in and looks up. At some point, they’ll get back to what they were doing, but the minute has passed. There isn’t anything dramatically wrong; however, that thin thread of focus has been snapped. In too many families and schools today, this is happening multiple times a day. 

Not only are there more distractions than ever before, but we’ve never had a culture like ours where children are exposed to so many stimuli; there is little time to focus. Children are moving between activities at an incredibly rapid pace and don’t have nearly enough time to fully immerse themselves in any single activity.

Children’s ability to concentrate has been viewed as something inherent (children either are able to focus or they aren’t). We tell parents that their child “has trouble paying attention” or “just won’t sit still,” which makes it seem as if the ability to stay focused is simply a product of genetics. However, the field of developmental psychology shows us a far more optimistic view of concentration. Just like children learn new words every day, children develop their capacity for focus as well. But instead of forcing the process along, researchers believe that children develop their ability to focus when provided with an environment that supports deep engagement with their surroundings.

Developing Their Ability to Concentrate

Dr. Adele Diamond is a developmental psychologist whose work focuses on Executive Function. This includes all the skills that allow children to follow directions, refrain from acting impulsively, switch between ideas, and remain focused long enough to finish a job. Her research demonstrates that concentration is much more complex than simply sitting quietly. A child who stays with a puzzle even when one piece doesn’t fit is employing several executive functions at the same time: working memory, self-regulation, problem solving, and persistence. 

According to researchers at the Harvard Center on the Developing Child, these abilities act as the “air traffic control” of the developing brain because they help children keep track of many pieces of information, manage competing demands, and regulate their own behavior.

Montessori philosophy is especially relevant here. Maria Montessori realized that concentration is not only something that occurs in the classroom but also a foundation of healthy development. She saw that when children were fully immersed in meaningful tasks (or work), things began to change within them. They were less anxious, more independent, and better organized. And sometimes, remarkably happy afterward. In The Absorbent Mind, she writes that “the child who concentrates is infinitely happy.” 

At first glance, this quote appears simplistic until you’ve seen a young child lose track of time entirely while washing a table, constructing a tower, writing letters, or performing repetitive movements simply because they provide satisfaction. To Montessori, concentrating wasn’t compliance. Concentration indicated to her that a child had made meaningful connections with their world.

Constant Distractions Become the Backdrop

Distractions are not always obvious. They happen in subtle ways that eventually take children away from what they are doing. This can take the form of constant change of activities, adults who ask a lot of questions while children are occupied with something, noise, or a seemingly infinite number of options to choose from. 

On their own, these distractions may not seem very important, but together they make it difficult for children to remain engaged in a single meaningful activity long enough to concentrate. This is one of the reasons why prepared environments play a central role in the Montessori approach to teaching. 

While most people think about the concept as referring to beautifully organized classrooms, the reality is much deeper and more meaningful. The prepared environment in a Montessori setting is designed to support children’s concentration. Special care is taken when selecting materials, ensuring that a specific sequenced collection is available and that the child is allowed to use them freely. 

Rather than constantly encouraging children to move on to something new, a prepared environment quietly communicates to kids to stay with an activity, repeat it, and continue exploring it for as long as it remains meaningful.

Modern research echoes what Montessori educators have observed for generations. Researchers Cynthia DiCarlo of LSU (Louisiana State University) and Carrie Ota of WSU (Weber State University) demonstrated that the way adults provide choices and support directly affects children’s ability to sustain their attention. 

Younger children will often maintain a higher level of attention when provided only a few relevant choices; however, the older preschooler will continue to grow toward increasing levels of independence. It is common for parents to underestimate the degree to which too many choices can overwhelm a child. For instance, a room full of bins, shelves, toys that flash lights, art supplies, etc., although may seem like a wonderful space to an adult due to all its potential, can be perceived as quite chaotic from a child’s perspective. A child rapidly transitions from one activity to another not because they lack curiosity, but because the environment continues to ask them to make another decision. Reducing visual distractions in a space allows children to find a place where they can choose and then commit themselves to that task through focused engagement.

How Real World Experiences Develop Meaningful Concentration

Educational neuroscientist Dr. Tzipi Horowitz-Kraus has studied how children’s brains respond to reading, screens, and storytelling experiences. In discussions published by Children and Screens, she describes attention as involving both quick alerting systems and slower executive systems that support memory, self-control, and deeper thinking. Her work highlights an important distinction between passive stimulation and active engagement. A child may appear captivated by fast-moving images, yet that does not necessarily mean the brain networks responsible for language, imagination, and sustained attention are being strengthened in the same way. For example, shared reading illustrates this well. When a parent points out illustrations, asks “What do you think will happen next?” or relates a character’s experience back to their kid’s own experiences. A child is essentially predicting, remembering, imagining and integrating different pieces of information. This principle applies similarly to hands-on experiences such as building, pouring water, washing dishes, sorting objects, painting, gardening, kneading dough, and working with materials. Each of these experiences requires a child to observe closely, adjust their actions based upon that observation, and continue to attend to the task at hand because the environment itself will provide immediate feedback.

Similarly, environmental psychologist Dr. Frances Kuo studied the effects of nature on children’s ability to pay attention. Dr. Kuo’s research indicates that exposure to green spaces may help children who struggle to sustain their attention develop their ability to direct it. Green spaces present multiple sensory experiences with minimal demands for children to constantly react. Leaves rustle, birds sing, bugs fly around, clouds slowly move across the sky.

Engaging in physical movement is equally important. As stated earlier many adults view concentration as sitting still; however, most young children exhibit some of their most intense periods of concentration while their bodies are physically involved in an activity. Montessori principles recognize this. Practical life activities are not merely large versions of everyday household chores for children. Activities including pouring liquids into containers, cleaning surfaces with soap and water, rubbing wood polish onto furniture, and cooking meals require coordination, sequence of steps, observation and precise control of movement. These common daily activities are able to strengthen concentration in children as they inherently reward children for demonstrating patience, care and repetition in completing their assigned tasks.

Protecting Attention in Everyday Family Life

Perhaps one of the biggest challenges families face today is not poor parenting; it is finding the time to allow children to truly engage with something they value. Contemporary family life moves rapidly. Mornings are busy getting everyone ready for school or daycare. Afternoon hours are spent attending school events, extracurricular activities, running errands, doing homework, and caring for younger siblings. Given the pace of modern family life, it can become easy to distract your child again and again rather than allowing them time to reflect upon something that interests them. Protecting the quiet moments in your family routine when your child can practice sustained attention starts with acknowledging that your child doesn’t need a perfect environment. What your child needs is consistent time to explore something that holds their interest.

Once, I worked with a family who felt that their young daughter was unable to play independently. She would frequently get up to ask for assistance, transition rapidly from one activity to another, and become agitated if she was not assisted. I took a closer look at the array of materials she had available. The room contained approximately 40 toys and activities, each placed in a large bin. The only thing wrong was that there were far too many things vying for her attention. 

Working with the family, we removed nearly all of these items, leaving only a few select activities and a small table where she could go back and forth with her work during the day. Initially, she appeared somewhat perplexed. Then, relatively quickly, she went back to the same puzzle again and again, spent increasingly long periods of time drawing, and developed elaborate homes to house a handful of small stuffed animals. The amount of attention that existed within her did not change. What changed was the degree of competition the surrounding environment provided for it.

These kinds of experiences illustrate one of Montessori’s quieter observations. Children will often demonstrate extraordinary concentration when adults refrain from consistently directing their attention. We desire to encourage, praise, assist with challenges, and provide entertainment for our children. However, each unnecessary interruption forces children to move their attention away from what they discovered themselves. There are times when providing support means simply observing. If a parent observes a child’s efforts without intervening, concentration will grow by itself.

Guidance still matters. Children need encouragement, reassurance, and opportunities to develop knowledge while supported by caring adults. A parent who says, “I see you’re having difficulty getting this piece to fit,” and waits quietly provides the child with the opportunity to figure it out on their own. A parent who immediately assists the child in completing the puzzle removes the child’s concentration in favor of their own. While individual actions such as these may appear minor, when repeated hundreds of times, they have a significant impact on how children perceive challenge, perseverance, and their abilities to resolve problems on their own.

Creating Space for Attention to Flourish

The American Academy of Pediatrics has encouraged families to think less about counting minutes of media use and more about what digital experiences may be replacing. This way of thinking goes further than just looking at screens. Families should be considering whether children still have ample opportunity for engaging in conversations, movement, reading, exploring the outdoors, creative play, and being calm enough to have quiet moments that allow the mind to settle. Even parents find it challenging to maintain their focus under continuous exposure to stimuli. Given the immaturity of children’s self-regulatory skills, they tend to benefit even more from structured schedules that contain time for recovery after episodes of stimulation.

Montessori classrooms understand this concept by allowing children uninterrupted work cycles that gradually settle them into a state of concentration. Instead of expecting children to produce right away, they realize that children need time to observe, choose an option, tentatively initiate an activity, and return to the same activity before becoming deeply involved. Parents can offer similar alternatives at home by providing their children with a basket of carefully chosen books, a small table for drawing, or a shelf with a limited selection of activity options. One way parents can support their child’s concentration is by identifying what truly captures their child’s attention. Whether through pattern-making, movement, listening to a story, experiencing nature, building, listening to music, or performing practical tasks, when children are genuinely interested in something, they typically show the potential for continued involvement. As children experience the quiet satisfaction of maintaining a deep interest in meaningful pursuits, they will begin to demonstrate the ability to apply this concentration across various areas of learning and everyday life.

Additionally, there is a greater purpose behind safeguarding attention. By helping children learn to concentrate, they are teaching them to pay close attention, persevere through obstacles, make informed decisions, and derive pleasure from meaningful exertion. In today’s world, where children are repeatedly asked to look elsewhere, concentrating on a single, worthy pursuit becomes a form of independence. Reclaiming attention does not mean rejecting contemporary society entirely. It merely implies understanding that, regardless of whether children engage in modern forms of technology or traditional methods of communication, they still need the following: meaningful work; movement; stories; nature; periods of silence; and caring adults who appreciate the journey as much as the destination. Perhaps this is one of Maria Montessori’s most enduring gifts: the reminder that concentration is not something we force on children. It is something we patiently protect until it has the opportunity to flourish.

About the Author

Elena Maren is with Alphabet Trains, a company that produces research-backed educational materials to help children become curious, confident learners for life. Drawing on her knowledge of educational psychology and her experience in Montessori communities abroad, Elena shares her expertise on child development, attention, creativity, and prepared environments for successful growth, both at home and in schools.

By Tim Seldin

I recently read a thoughtful essay by my friend and colleague Tammy Oesting entitled What Have We Lost? In it, Tammy reflects on stories from the early Montessori movement and asks whether, somewhere along the way, we may have unintentionally left behind some of the most human aspects of Montessori education.

As I read her piece, I thought of my own childhood.

I grew up at the Barrie School, outside Washington, D.C., founded by my mother in 1932. When I think about my years there, I certainly remember classrooms and wonderful teachers. I remember learning to read. I remember mathematics, history, and science.

But those are not the memories that come rushing back first.

What I remember are the smells coming from the kitchen on cold winter mornings.

I remember stopping by before class to grab a piece of toast and some fruit. I remember Edith, the cook, standing over enormous pots preparing lunch for what seemed like half the world. As I grew older, I spent countless hours helping her. We peeled potatoes, washed vegetables, stirred soup, baked bread, and prepared meals for hundreds of children and adults.

At the time, I never thought of it as school.

It was simply life.

The same was true throughout the campus. There were horses to feed, chickens to care for, gardens to tend, sidewalks to sweep, visitors to greet, younger children to help, and endless jobs that needed doing. The school depended on all of us.

What strikes me now is that no one seemed particularly concerned with whether these activities were educational. Of course they were educational. But that wasn’t the point. They mattered because they were real. The horses needed feeding whether we felt like it or not. The gardens needed watering. Lunch had to be prepared. The community genuinely depended upon our contribution.

And perhaps that is what Tammy’s article brought back for me.

Children need opportunities to discover that they matter. Not because adults tell them they matter. Not because they receive awards, grades, or praise. They discover it because their actions make a difference in the lives of others.

To understand why this is so central to Montessori’s vision, it helps to remember who Maria Montessori actually was.

We tend to think of her as an educator. And she was. But she was first and foremost a physician and psychiatrist, a scientist who came to education through medicine and through her work with children whom the world had largely given up on. She was a contemporary of Sigmund Freud, developed her own framework for understanding mental life, and spent years working with children labeled as mentally defective — children she came to believe were not damaged, but simply unstimulated, unseen, and denied any real agency over their own lives. When she gave those children meaningful work, real choices, and genuine dignity, they flourished in ways that astonished the medical establishment.

That experience was the seed of everything that followed.

It is no accident that the figures most drawn to Montessori’s ideas in the early decades of the twentieth century were not only educators but psychologists and psychoanalysts — among them Anna Freud, Alfred Adler, Jean Piaget, and Erik Erikson. They recognized in her work something they were pursuing from a different direction: that the deepest human needs are not primarily academic. They are the needs for agency, for belonging, for the experience of genuine competence, for the freedom to discover who one is. Anna Freud understood this with particular clarity. She recognized that Montessori had been the first to see that a child’s engagement could only grow freely when it was not prescribed and controlled by adults — that the joy of succeeding at work one has chosen for oneself is a more powerful force than any external reward or requirement.

What Montessori built, in other words, was not primarily a system of instruction.

It was a framework for mental and emotional health.

She believed — and the evidence of her schools confirmed — that children who are trusted with real choices, given meaningful responsibilities, allowed to follow their own curiosity, and welcomed as genuine members of a community develop something that no curriculum can teach directly. They develop a stable sense of self. They grow into people who know they are capable, who trust their own judgment, and who understand that their presence in the world is not merely tolerated but genuinely needed.

Maria Montessori called her schools Casa dei Bambini. We translate that phrase as Children’s House, and in doing so, I think we lose something essential.

Dorothy Canfield Fisher noticed this problem as early as 1912, in her book A Montessori Mother, one of the first accounts written by an American who had actually visited Montessori’s schools in Rome. Fisher wrote that the phrase Casa dei Bambini was being translated everywhere by English-speaking people as The Children’s House, whereas its real meaning, both linguistic and spiritual, was The Children’s Home — or, as she put it, the Children’s Community. She insisted on this rendering because she felt it offered a far more accurate and complete insight into the character of what Montessori had actually created.

Fisher was right, and over a century later her observation still matters.

A house is a building. A home is something altogether different.

A home is a place where life happens. People prepare meals together. They celebrate and solve problems together. They care for one another, share responsibilities, and learn how to live together. When Montessori used the word casa, she was not describing a curriculum or a classroom arrangement. She was describing a community — a place where children genuinely belonged and where their presence and contribution actually mattered.

This is the dimension of Montessori education I believe we most urgently need to reclaim. Not as a philosophical nicety, but as a matter of children’s wellbeing.

We are living through a period of genuine crisis in the mental health of young people. Anxiety, disconnection, and a pervasive sense of purposelessness are increasingly common, even among children in early adolescence. The research on what protects children from these outcomes points consistently in one direction: children who have a sense of agency, who experience genuine belonging, who believe their actions matter, and who have had the opportunity to discover who they are through real work and real relationships are far more resilient than children who have been managed, praised, evaluated, and entertained but never truly needed.

Montessori understood this a hundred and twenty years ago.

Over the years, I sometimes wonder whether we have become so focused on the mechanics of Montessori education that we occasionally overlook its deeper purpose. We carefully protect the work cycle. We maintain beautiful materials. We document lessons and track progress. All of those things matter.

But children also need time to talk. Time to imagine. Time to create. Time to wander outdoors. Time to become absorbed in projects that no adult planned. Time to build friendships. Time to experience the ordinary rhythms of community life.

One of the passages in Tammy’s essay describes the midday meals remembered by Margot Waltuch. Children and adults sat together for long stretches of time, eating, talking, laughing, sharing stories. I found myself wondering how many schools today would view such a meal as an essential part of the curriculum. Yet when I think back to my own childhood, I realize that many of life’s most important lessons were learned around a table. Meals teach patience, conversation, listening, and courtesy. They teach children to become genuinely interested in other people. Meals build community.

The same can be said of gardening, caring for animals, preparing food, maintaining the environment, planning events, or resolving conflicts. These activities may not fit neatly into curriculum guides. Yet they teach children how to live.

As children grow older, these opportunities become even more important. Elementary children should help plan their own expeditions and outings. They should participate in solving the practical problems that arise within their community. They should learn how to navigate disagreements, repair damaged relationships, and make decisions together. Adolescents, especially, need meaningful work in the real world — opportunities to venture into the larger community, interview people, volunteer, organize projects, and discover that their efforts have value beyond the classroom walls.

Children are not merely preparing for life. They are already living it.

The same principle applies to the arts. I sometimes worry that we unintentionally place creativity into neat little boxes. Art from 10:00 to 10:45. Music on Thursdays. Drama during special events. Yet children are naturally creative beings who should have opportunities to paint when inspiration strikes, write stories that wander in unexpected directions, put on plays with minimal adult intervention, and create things that are entirely their own. Some of the most meaningful performances I have ever witnessed were not carefully choreographed by adults. They emerged from the imaginations of children working together. The process was often chaotic. It was also profoundly educational. When children negotiate roles, solve problems, build sets, and figure things out together, they are developing capacities that will serve them throughout their lives.

Children also belong outside. Not occasionally. Not simply for recess. Outside should be woven throughout the day. Children need mud on their boots, gardens, weather, birds, insects, streams, and open sky. They need to know the names of the trees around them. Most of all, they need to develop a relationship with the natural world. A child who falls in love with nature will spend a lifetime caring for it.

As I reflect on Tammy’s question, I find myself wondering whether we sometimes focus too heavily on documenting academic progress while overlooking the larger story of childhood. Parents certainly need to know what their children are learning. But perhaps they also deserve to know who their children are becoming. Imagine receiving not simply a list of lessons completed but a portrait of a year in the life of a child — photographs from expeditions, stories they have written, gardens they have planted, alongside the child’s own voice reflecting on what challenged them, what they are proud of, and what they hope to accomplish next. Those are the questions that help children become reflective human beings.

Tammy’s question does not ultimately lead us backward, toward nostalgia for 1907. It leads us toward a renewed appreciation for something that was always central to Montessori’s vision — something Dorothy Canfield Fisher understood clearly more than a hundred years ago, even as American educators were already beginning to translate it too narrowly.

Montessori education was never intended to be merely a method of instruction. The woman who created it was a psychiatrist before she was a teacher. She understood that what children need most is not a better curriculum. They need to know they are capable. They need to discover who they are. They need to belong to something larger than themselves and to feel, in a way that no amount of praise can manufacture, that their presence in the world makes a genuine difference.

That is what a casa is.

Not a building with beautiful materials on the shelves.

A community. A home. A place where children learn not only how to read, write, calculate, and reason, but also how to contribute, create, care, collaborate, and belong.

When children experience that kind of community, they leave school carrying something far more valuable than academic knowledge alone.

They leave with the understanding that they matter — and that they have something meaningful to contribute to the world around them.

A 1950s-era Hermes Rocket portable typewriter similar to the one that I wrote with every day from age 5 through university.

The Promise — and Limits — of Montessori Inclusion: Following Every Child Honestly

A recent video by Montessori educator Brianna Rettig of Tiny Cabin Montessori prompted me to write about a question that has quietly troubled many Montessori educators for years. In her video, Brianna discusses her experience taking a course on learning differences through the Maria Montessori Institute in London and shares research by Montessori historian Professor Paola Trabalzini. Trabalzini argues that Dr. Maria Montessori’s work with children at the Orthophrenic School and her later work at the Casa dei Bambini were not simply the same educational model applied to different groups of children. Rather, Montessori adapted her approach to the unique developmental needs of each population she served.

That insight strikes me as deeply important — and somewhat uncomfortable — for Montessori schools today. We often say that Montessori is for every child, and in many respects, I believe that is true. During more than fifty years in Montessori education, I have seen remarkable success with children who have ADHD, autism, dyslexia, anxiety, sensory processing differences, executive functioning challenges, and many other learning profiles. Indeed, many families discover Montessori precisely because conventional classrooms have not met their child’s needs.

But there is another question that deserves honest discussion. While we all want to help as many children as possible — and while we should continue expanding our understanding of learning differences and strengthening our teachers’ ability to support them — have we reached the point where our expectations sometimes exceed what even an excellent Montessori guide can realistically provide? This is not a question about compassion. It is a question about professional responsibility, honesty with families, fairness to teachers, and our obligation to every child in the classroom. It is also a conversation that many Montessori school leaders are having privately, even if they are reluctant to discuss it publicly.

Montessori Has Always Been About Following the Child

One of the persistent misunderstandings of Montessori history is the belief that Dr. Montessori simply took what she learned working with children at the Orthophrenic School in Rome and applied it unchanged to typically developing children. That is not what happened. Maria Montessori was, above all, an observer who continually modified her methods in response to the developmental characteristics of the children before her. Her early work with children, then described as “deficient” or “phrenasthenic,” was medically informed and educationally radical. She drew from the work of Itard and Séguin and developed materials and approaches that helped children whom many people had dismissed as incapable of learning.

But when she opened the first Casa dei Bambini in San Lorenzo in 1907, she did not simply reproduce the Orthophrenic School. She created a different kind of prepared environment for a different population of children — one in which freedom, order, purposeful activity, movement, choice, concentration, independence, and social development gradually emerged in new ways. Montessori’s genius was not that she invented one classroom model and then insisted that every child fit into it. Her genius was that she observed children carefully and prepared environments that responded to their developmental needs. In other words, Montessori herself differentiated, and that may be one of the most important lessons we can recover today.

The Extraordinary Progress We Have Made

There is much to celebrate. When I began my career, many children with learning differences were misunderstood, underestimated, or simply excluded. Today, educators recognize neurodiversity in ways that would have been unimaginable only a generation or two ago, and Montessori educators have contributed significantly to that progress.

Many of the finest minds in our movement have shown us how Montessori education can be adapted thoughtfully and successfully for children with a wide range of developmental profiles. Educators such as Maria Eva Caffin, Christine Lowry, Joyce Pickering, Ann Epstein, and others have deepened our collective understanding of dyslexia, language processing differences, attention challenges, executive functioning, sensory processing, motor planning, and social-emotional development. Schools and programs such as the Shelton School in Dallas and Elizabeth Academy in Salt Lake City have demonstrated that Montessori principles can be woven together with specialized expertise to support children with learning differences and other exceptionalities. Their work reminds us that inclusion is not merely an aspiration. It is also a craft — one that requires knowledge, structure, humility, observation, patience, and professional judgment, and one that demands we recognize that good intentions, however sincere, are not enough.

There Is Much We Can — and Should — Do Better

Many of the most effective interventions for children with learning differences are not exotic clinical techniques. They are often simply good teaching made more explicit and more intentional. Clearer routines, more careful observation, thoughtful environmental adaptations, visual supports, and predictable daily schedules go a long way. So do grace-and-courtesy lessons taught with greater deliberateness, more explicit scaffolding for executive functioning, smaller steps between presentations, and more opportunities for meaningful repetition without shame. Better and earlier communication with families matters enormously, as does building referral pathways when concerns emerge and cultivating genuine partnerships with occupational therapists, speech-language pathologists, psychologists, developmental pediatricians, and reading specialists.

None of this diminishes Montessori. Done well, it strengthens and enriches it. Indeed, much of this is simply the fuller expression of Montessori’s own principle: observe the child, remove unnecessary obstacles, prepare the environment, and offer the next right help.

Sometimes One Accommodation Changes a Life

This discussion is not merely theoretical for me. It is deeply personal.

As a young child at the Barrie School in the early 1950s, I struggled with what today would almost certainly be recognized as dyspraxia, a developmental coordination disorder, though at the time no one had a name for it. I was awkward and clumsy, my fine motor skills were poor, and despite repeated attempts, I could never master riding a bicycle. My handwriting was dreadful — what my teachers might charitably have called “chicken scratch” — at a time when every child at our school was expected to develop a beautiful cursive hand. Curiously, I learned to ride horses at a very young age and became a capable rider. Like many children with developmental differences, my strengths and weaknesses did not follow a simple pattern.

Fortunately, my teachers did not conclude that I was lazy or incapable. Nor did they insist that I simply try harder until my handwriting somehow became beautiful. Instead, they observed me — and then they did something remarkably simple and remarkably wise. They encouraged my parents to buy me a lightweight, non-electric portable typewriter manufactured in Switzerland: a Hermes Rocket. That little machine changed my life. I learned to “write” by typing, and I carried that Hermes Rocket throughout elementary school, high school, and even at Georgetown University. While other students filled notebooks with handwritten essays, I produced mine on that little portable typewriter. When, in the early 1970s, I discovered computers and word processing, I thought I had died and gone to heaven.

Looking back, I realize how profoundly Montessori my teachers’ response really was. They did not lower expectations or excuse me from writing. They simply found another path that allowed me to accomplish the same intellectual work without requiring me to overcome a neurological challenge that had little to do with my ability to think. The accommodation did not fundamentally alter the classroom, demand extraordinary resources, or diminish the experience of the other children. It simply removed an unnecessary barrier between one child and his ability to express his ideas. I never felt broken. My teachers assumed I had ideas worth expressing and found another way for me to express them. Looking back all these years later, I understand what a gift they gave me: they accommodated my disability without defining me by it, and that distinction is at the heart of this entire conversation.

Good Montessori Is Good for Almost Every Child

One lesson continues to emerge from both developmental neuroscience and Montessori practice: children are designed to move, to work with their hands, to contribute, and to become increasingly capable through real responsibility. This is true whether a child is neurotypical or neurodivergent, and it points to something I have grown increasingly concerned about over many years.

Many Montessori schools — often with the best of intentions — have drifted toward quieter, more sedentary, more academically compressed programs. The irony is that the very children we most worry about may be precisely the ones who most need what we have allowed to shrink. 

Consider what becomes possible when children spend substantial portions of their day engaged in genuinely meaningful work — not pretend work or busy work, but real work that adults in their community actually need done. In a garden or on a farm, children plant, harvest, and care for animals. 

In a kitchen, they prepare food for the community, bake bread, and learn to cook for the younger children. In a workshop, they build furniture, repair fences, and master traditional crafts. On the school grounds, they maintain trails, plant trees, and work alongside adults who genuinely depend on their contributions. Through school enterprises, they operate student businesses, lead community service projects, and take on responsibilities that require sustained planning and follow-through.

These experiences are not merely enrichment, nor are they peripheral to Montessori’s vision. They are developmental experiences of the highest order, building executive function, persistence, judgment, self-confidence, coordination, social competence, and emotional regulation in ways that desk-based learning rarely can. 

Maria Montessori understood something that neuroscience is only beginning to explain fully: movement organizes the brain, purpose organizes behavior, and responsibility organizes character. Many children who struggle to remain engaged during prolonged periods of seatwork become remarkably calm and focused when given authentic responsibility. The child who finds it difficult to regulate his emotions in a chair may become an entirely different child while caring for animals, splitting kindling, harvesting vegetables, or repairing a broken gate.

None of this eliminates autism, cures ADHD, or erases dyslexia. But it often creates conditions in which children become more regulated, more successful, and more available for learning — and those benefits extend equally to children who carry no diagnosis whatsoever. Good Montessori works because it is profoundly developmental, and Practical Life was never intended merely as preparation for later academic work. It is life itself.

Teacher Preparation Must Continue to Evolve

Montessori teacher education has never stood still. Dr. Montessori herself continually revised her courses as new observations emerged, and we must do the same. Today’s Montessori guides need a considerably stronger foundation in neurodevelopment than previous generations received. Understanding executive functioning, sensory processing, working memory, processing speed, developmental language disorders, dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyspraxia, autism, ADHD, anxiety, and the effects of trauma is no longer the province of specialists alone. It belongs in every Montessori classroom — not because every guide should become a psychologist, but because deeper understanding produces sharper observation, and sharper observation is the foundation of everything Montessori does.

This also means building genuine comfort with the collaborative relationships that can extend a classroom’s reach: occupational therapists, speech-language pathologists, reading specialists, developmental pediatricians, psychologists, and behavioral consultants each bring expertise that no Montessori guide can reasonably be expected to replicate independently. 

We have much to learn from these professions, and they, increasingly, have much to learn from Montessori. The best Montessori schools I visit today are not abandoning their philosophy in the name of therapeutic intervention. They are enriching it while remaining faithful to the prepared environment, incorporating what neuroscience and developmental research have taught us over the past century. I believe that is what Maria Montessori would have done.

But We Must Also Be Honest

At this point, the conversation becomes more difficult.

Every experienced Montessori educator has encountered a child whose needs exceeded what the classroom could reasonably provide — not because the child was wrong for Montessori, but because the classroom lacked the support, staffing, or specialist resources that child genuinely needed. 

That need may be academic, social-emotional, behavioral, or some combination of all three. A child may be overwhelmed by sensory input, have extremely fragile emotional regulation, or have profoundly impaired communication. A child may require therapeutic interventions or one-on-one support that the current classroom is simply not equipped to provide, and safety may have become a recurring concern. Every one of those children deserves an education, deserves dignity, and deserves adults who refuse to give up on them. But acknowledging those truths does not eliminate another reality.

Montessori guides are human beings.

Imagine a Children’s House with twenty-four to thirty children whose developmental needs span a genuinely wide range. Several are managing significant anxiety or carrying the weight of trauma at home. Some have communication differences that require patient, adapted interaction throughout the day. Others need intensive, individualized support with executive functioning or emotional regulation. In some cases, the level of support a child genuinely requires — through no fault of the child — amounts to dedicated one-on-one adult presence for much of the day. Now picture one guide and perhaps one assistant, without specialist consultation, behavioral support, an occupational therapist, or an additional aide.

The mathematics becomes impossible. No matter how gifted the guide, attention is finite, and every minute devoted to one child is a minute unavailable to another. That is not a criticism of anyone — it is simply reality. The tragedy is that teachers often feel guilty for acknowledging it, and they should not. We would never ask one physician to care for many patients with dramatically different medical needs simultaneously while assuring every family that each would receive exactly what they require. Yet that is sometimes the expectation we place upon Montessori guides. No amount of professional development changes the arithmetic of human attention, and recognizing that limit is not a failure of commitment. It is an acknowledgment of reality.

Whose Rights Are We Protecting?

Perhaps the most difficult question of all is this: when we speak about inclusion, whose rights are we protecting?

For many years, the conversation has rightly focused on the rights of children with disabilities and learning differences, and with good reason. Historically, those rights were too often ignored — children were excluded, underestimated, or denied opportunities they deserved. The movement toward inclusion has corrected many of those injustices, and that is something we should celebrate. But in correcting one imbalance, we must be careful not to create another.

Every child in a Montessori classroom has rights, and among the most fundamental is the right to an environment genuinely prepared to meet their needs. 

The child with autism has a right to a setting where the adults are equipped and supported to truly understand and serve them. 

The child with ADHD has a right to a classroom prepared to work with their actual neurology, not simply to manage it. 

The child with dyslexia, the child coping with anxiety, the child recovering from trauma — each has a right to an educational environment organized around their genuine wellbeing. And every child in that classroom, without exception, has a right to a setting that is calm, purposeful, safe, and genuinely prepared to serve them — including the quiet child who finally found a place where she can concentrate, and the child who comes eagerly to school each morning because the classroom feels peaceful and welcoming. So does the teacher.

Montessori spoke often about freedom, but what we sometimes forget is that she almost always paired freedom with responsibility. Freedom was never absolute — it existed within a carefully prepared community in which everyone’s freedom mattered. The same principle applies here. The rights of one child cannot completely eclipse the rights of everyone else.

The Prepared Environment Is Also a Teacher

Montessori often described the prepared environment as if it were a living teacher, and she was right. The environment itself educates through its order, beauty, predictability, calm, opportunities for concentration, and open invitation to purposeful work. These are not decorative features. They are active ingredients in children’s development, and when the environment becomes chronically chaotic, it ceases to function as Montessori intended.

Every experienced Montessori teacher knows the difference between a classroom that occasionally experiences disruption because children are learning to become social human beings, and one in which disruption has become the defining characteristic of daily life. 

The first is normal, even healthy. The second changes the environment for everyone. 

Children who were developing concentration begin losing it. Teachers spend increasing amounts of time managing crises rather than observing learning. Presentations become shorter, interruptions become more frequent, and the community’s rhythm is fundamentally altered. The prepared environment slowly becomes something Montessori never intended — and that is not good for any child, including the child whose needs are greatest.

Sometimes the Kindest Answer Is More Help

One of the mistakes we sometimes make is assuming there are only two choices: either the child remains in the classroom exactly as things are, or the child is rejected. Montessori thinking should lead us to resist that false binary. Between those poles lies a wide range of possibilities — additional classroom support, a trained assistant, occupational therapy, speech therapy, behavioral consultation, psychological support, a modified schedule, smaller group instruction for part of the day, parent coaching, medical evaluation, or a more specialized Montessori setting. Sometimes these supports make all the difference. Sometimes, despite everyone’s best efforts, they do not. But the question we should always be asking is not how to preserve a particular placement. The question is how to help the child flourish, and those are not always the same thing.

Honesty Is an Act of Kindness and Respect

One of the hardest conversations a school leader ever has is telling loving parents that the school may no longer be the best setting for their child. No head of school wants to have that conversation, no teacher enjoys it, and no parent wants to hear it. Yet sometimes avoiding it causes greater harm than having it. Parents may continue believing that success is just around the corner. Teachers become increasingly exhausted. Other children become increasingly affected. The child himself often experiences repeated frustration because he is being asked to succeed in an environment that no longer matches his needs, and eventually everyone suffers.

There is another way. Schools can speak honestly — with kindness, with compassion, with humility — saying something like: “We love your child. We believe in your child. We have learned a great deal together. And we also believe your child now needs supports beyond what we can responsibly provide.” That is not abandonment. That is professional integrity, and it may be one of the greatest acts of love a school can offer.

The Difference Between Accommodation and Transformation

My own experience illustrates an important distinction. My teachers did not redesign the classroom because I struggled with handwriting. They found a tool that allowed me to participate fully in it. The classroom remained true to its culture, the expectations remained high, and the accommodation removed a barrier without transforming the nature of the environment.

Some accommodations do exactly that: they remove barriers while preserving and even strengthening the prepared environment. Visual schedules, additional movement opportunities, assistive technology, adjusted presentations, a slower pace, sensory supports, and genuine collaboration with specialists can each open the classroom to children it might otherwise have failed. When such supports are in place and working well, remarkable things become possible, and the prepared environment can serve children it could not have served a generation ago.

But when adequate supports are not in place — when a classroom is operating without the staffing, specialist collaboration, or resources a child genuinely requires — the situation changes. 

If one child requires continuous adult support throughout the day and no additional adult is present, if behavioral dysregulation has become a persistent safety concern without specialist consultation available, if the guide is spending most of each day preventing harm rather than guiding learning, these conditions are not reflections of any child’s worth or potential. They are indicators that the supports currently in place are insufficient — and that the most honest, loving response is to seek arrangements that can genuinely serve everyone. Recognizing that fact is not prejudice. It is observation, and observation is where Montessori always began.

We Must Also Protect Our Teachers

There is one more group whose needs we rarely discuss openly: our teachers.

Montessori teachers enter this profession because they love children, and they are among the most generous people I know. Many routinely sacrifice evenings, weekends, personal income, and family time for their schools. 

Many of us worry that we mistake generosity for unlimited capacity. Its no wonder that it has become increasingly challenging to find great Montessori teachers.

Today we ask Montessori guides to become fluent not only in child development and curriculum, but in parent education, trauma, executive functioning, neurodiversity, documentation, technology, marketing, admissions, conflict resolution, behavioral intervention, and social-emotional learning — and then we ask them to deploy all of it simultaneously while maintaining a beautiful, functional Montessori environment. 

It is an extraordinary and ever-expanding set of demands, and we should not be surprised that burnout has become one of the most pressing challenges facing our profession.

Supporting teachers is not separate from supporting children. It is one of the primary ways we support children. A burned-out teacher cannot offer the careful observation, calm presence, and thoughtful guidance that Montessori education depends on. If we truly value children, we must also value the adults who serve them — which means providing training, coaching, specialist partnerships, reasonable class sizes, and additional staffing when children’s needs genuinely require it. And it means giving teachers authentic permission to say, “We have reached the limits of what this classroom can responsibly provide.” That sentence should never be understood as a failure. Sometimes it is the beginning of finding the right answer.

Following the Child Requires Following the Truth

As I reflect on Brianna Rettig’s video and the historical work of Professor Paola Trabalzini, I keep returning to one simple realization: Maria Montessori never asked us to defend a method. She asked us to observe the children. Those are not the same thing, and the distance between them matters enormously.

When we become more committed to defending our philosophy than to understanding the child before us, we have already drifted away from Montessori. Likewise, when we assume that one educational environment should serve every child equally well, we may also be drifting away from her deepest insight. The prepared environment was never intended to be a one-size-fits-all solution. It was intended to be exactly what its name suggests — a prepared environment, prepared for these children, this stage of development, these adults, these resources, and these needs. As those needs change, the environment sometimes must change as well. That, too, is following the child.

We Need More Montessori, Not Less

If there is one conclusion I hope readers take from these reflections, it is not that Montessori schools should become less inclusive. Quite the opposite. I believe we should become even better at serving children with learning differences, and I believe the path forward is more genuine Montessori, not less.

Teacher preparation should include a far deeper understanding of neurodevelopment than was common a generation ago, and schools should build stronger, more collaborative relationships with occupational therapists, speech-language pathologists, psychologists, pediatricians, and reading specialists. 

Our classrooms should reclaim what has been quietly slipping away: more movement, more meaningful Practical Life, more time outdoors, more gardening, cooking, music, woodworking, and animal care, more real responsibility, and more opportunities for children to do work that genuinely matters to the community around them.

These experiences benefit virtually every child, and I sometimes wonder whether they are not the missing ingredient in many schools today. In our understandable desire to demonstrate academic excellence. To reassure families that Montessori children learn to read, write, calculate, and compete, we may have allowed authentic childhood to shrink. 

The irony is that the children struggling the most may be precisely the ones who most need what we have allowed to diminish. Perhaps the answer is not more worksheets, more testing, or more clinical intervention layered on top of an increasingly academic day. Perhaps the answer is more Montessori — the Montessori that trusted movement and genuine work, that trusted nature and meaningful responsibility to do what direct instruction cannot.

But We Also Need More Humility

At the same time, we should have the humility to recognize that no educational approach — not Montessori, not progressive education, not traditional education, not any philosophy — can be everything for every child. Every school has limits, every teacher has limits, and every classroom has limits. Recognizing those limits is not an admission of failure. It is the beginning of wisdom and the precondition for an honest partnership with families.

One of the most dangerous promises any school can make is “We can serve every child.” No school can honestly make that claim. The more honest promise sounds something like this: “We will do everything reasonably within our power to understand your child. We will continue learning. We will seek expert guidance when needed. We will partner closely with your family, make thoughtful accommodations whenever we responsibly can, and if we reach a point where another setting can better serve your child, we will tell you honestly, compassionately, and without judgment.” That is a promise I believe Montessori schools can keep, and it is, I would argue, a far more trustworthy promise than one that claims to serve everyone equally well.

The Greatest Gift We Can Offer

Looking back over my own life, I remain deeply grateful for the teachers who saw beyond my unreadable handwriting. They saw a little boy who had ideas, and instead of insisting that I express those ideas exactly as every other child did, they found another path. That little Hermes Rocket typewriter became one of the greatest educational gifts anyone has ever given me. They accommodated my disability without defining me by it, and that, I have come to understand, is what great educators do.

Accommodations are not acts of charity. They are acts of respect. They say to a child: “I see you. I understand what is difficult for you. And I also see what is possible.” There is enormous wisdom in that message, and it applies as much to the thinking of school leaders designing programs as it does to the work of a guide responding to a single child.

Holding Two Truths at Once

Perhaps the real challenge before Montessori education is learning to hold two truths at the same time. The first is that Montessori education is remarkably well suited for many children with learning differences — far more children can thrive in Montessori environments than many people once believed. The second is that some children require resources, expertise, staffing, therapeutic interventions, or educational settings beyond what a particular Montessori classroom can reasonably provide. These truths do not contradict one another. They complete one another.

Holding them together requires judgment rather than ideology, observation rather than assumption, and humility rather than certainty. Above all, it requires courage — the courage to keep learning, to expand our understanding, to ask for help, to support our teachers honestly, and to tell families the truth even when it is difficult. And it requires the courage to remember that every decision we make should begin where Maria Montessori always began: with careful observation of the child. Not the diagnosis. Not the philosophy. Not the politics.

The child.

If this article has raised more questions than it has answered, then perhaps it has served its purpose. These are not easy questions. They deserve thoughtful discussion, respectful disagreement, careful research, and above all, deep compassion for every person involved. 

Our goal should never be to prove that Montessori can serve every child. Our goal should be something both more modest and more profound: to ensure that every child finds the environment in which he or she can truly flourish. When we do that, we are not abandoning Montessori.

We are honoring her most fundamental insight.

We are following the child.

Author’s Note: I offer these reflections with enormous respect for the educators and specialists who have devoted their lives to expanding Montessori’s capacity to serve children with learning differences. If anything, I hope this article encourages even deeper collaboration between Montessori educators, families, therapists, and researchers. The goal is not to lower our aspirations, but to match them with honesty, wisdom, and the resources children and teachers truly need.

Three Tools That Finally Match What Montessori Does

I rarely advocate for specific products in print. I have been around long enough to be skeptical of anything that presents itself as the answer to a problem our schools have been navigating for decades. But occasionally I encounter tools so genuinely aligned with what Montessori education values — and so useful in combination — that staying quiet feels like a disservice.

This is one of those times.

Over the past year, I have been looking closely at three assessment tools that I believe belong in far more Montessori schools than are currently using them.

The first is the MEFS App, a scientifically validated measure of executive function developed by researchers at the University of Minnesota.

The second is the developmental screening system from Chancey & Bruce Educational Resources, which I have written about separately and which I am increasingly convinced represents the best early childhood developmental assessment available to independent schools.

The third is the Developmental Environmental Rating Scale — the DERS — developed by the National Center for Montessori in the Public Sector, which assesses not the child but the classroom itself.

Used individually, each of these tools gives a school something valuable. Used together, they give a school something it has rarely had: a genuinely complete picture of how each child is developing, rigorous evidence of what the Montessori environment is actually producing, and a coherent framework for demonstrating all of it to the families and boards that need to understand it.

What We Know and What We Can Show

For as long as I have been in this work — and that is more than fifty years now — the strongest argument for Montessori education has been: come see for yourself. Visit our classrooms. Watch the children. You will understand.

That argument remains true. But it is no longer sufficient.

Public pre-K programs are expanding in state after state. Families are comparing options with a sophistication that was rare a generation ago. Boards and accrediting bodies want evidence of outcomes. And prospective parents — even those who are already drawn to Montessori — are asking harder questions than they used to. Philosophy matters to them, but so does proof.

The honest challenge is that Montessori builds things that conventional assessments do not measure well. Standardized tests tell us what a child already knows. They rarely tell us anything useful about how she manages herself, sustains effort, recovers from frustration, or brings flexible thinking to a problem she has not seen before. Those are the capacities that Montessori education develops with particular intentionality — and until recently, we had no reliable way to document that development systematically.

That is beginning to change.

Executive Function: The Heart of What We Build

Executive function is the umbrella term researchers use for the cognitive skills that govern how we manage ourselves and our thinking: working memory, cognitive flexibility, inhibitory control, and planning. These are not peripheral abilities. Study after study has confirmed that they are better predictors of long-term academic success than IQ — and that their influence extends well beyond school, shaping adult health, professional effectiveness, and the quality of relationships across a lifetime.

What strikes me every time I read this research is how precisely it describes what Montessori education is designed to develop. The three-hour uninterrupted work cycle is, among other things, a sustained daily exercise in working memory and inhibitory control. The freedom to choose work — real freedom, within a carefully prepared structure — builds cognitive flexibility and the capacity to initiate and sustain purposeful effort. The self-correcting materials shift the locus of evaluation from the teacher to the child, building internal monitoring and self-regulation. Maria Montessori did not use the language of neuroscience, but she was deliberately and systematically building executive function for decades before researchers gave it that name.

This means that a valid, reliable measure of executive function is not simply a useful research tool for Montessori schools. It is a direct measure of what we do and what we produce.

The MEFS App: Assessment That Fits Our Children

The MEFS — the Minnesota Executive Function Scale — was developed by Dr. Stephanie Carlson and Dr. Philip Zelazo, two of the leading researchers in executive function science. It is administered as a brief, game-like interaction on a tablet. Children as young as two can complete it without the experience feeling like a test, because for them, it genuinely does not. The assessment is appropriate across a wide age span, yields reliable and standardized results, and — importantly — measures executive function as something distinct from intelligence. It correlates strongly with other validated EF measures and shows low correlation with IQ. It is capturing something real and specific that most assessments entirely miss.

I know some Montessori educators will need a moment with this. We are cautious about standardized testing, and rightly so. We have seen what happens when the wrong tools are used to evaluate our children — when a child who has spent years developing concentration and self-direction is handed a timed worksheet and the result is presented as evidence of what she knows. The MEFS is not that. It is designed to observe developing cognitive capacities through an age-appropriate, engaging interaction. It is consistent with how we believe children should be assessed.

Used over time, MEFS data becomes a growth story. A school that tracks executive function from the toddler program through the primary years and into elementary can see not just where children are, but how they are developing — and whether the environments it is creating are doing what Montessori environments should do.

The DERS: Assessing the Environment, Not Just the Child

This brings me to the piece that makes the full framework coherent.

The MEFS tells us what is developing in the child. It does not, by itself, tell us why — or whether our classrooms are actually providing what Montessori classrooms should. That is what the Developmental Environmental Rating Scale addresses.

The DERS was developed by the National Center for Montessori in the Public Sector as a rigorous, Montessori-specific instrument for evaluating the quality of the prepared environment. Where generic classroom observation tools measure features that apply equally to any early childhood setting, the DERS is built around the specific conditions that define a well-functioning Montessori classroom: the integrity of the materials, the character and structure of the work cycle, the degree to which children exercise genuine self-direction, the quality of adult-child interactions, and the overall coherence of the prepared environment as a system.

The thesis underlying the DERS, and the reason I find it so compelling in combination with the MEFS, is direct and testable: classrooms that score high on the DERS should produce children who score high on the MEFS. A classroom that faithfully creates the conditions Montessori described — genuine freedom, a coherent prepared environment, sustained uninterrupted work, respectful adult presence — will be building executive function in the children who inhabit it. A classroom that has the right materials but lacks those conditions, or that interrupts the work cycle with transitions and teacher-directed activities, will be building something less than what Montessori intended. The DERS can tell you which situation you are in. The MEFS, tracked over time, can confirm it.

This matters practically for school leaders. A classroom observation tool tells you what to look for and gives you a framework for honest reflection and productive coaching. It identifies specifically where a classroom environment is strong and where it falls short — not in terms of generic quality metrics, but in terms of the Montessori-specific conditions that produce the outcomes we care about. And it creates accountability that is grounded in our own values rather than borrowed from a framework built for different purposes.

The National Center has developed a licensing program that allows schools to access both the DERS and the MEFS as an integrated annual subscription, which makes it practical for schools to use them systematically rather than as one-off exercises. The connection between the two tools is not incidental. It is the point: assess the environment, assess the children developing within it, and see whether the relationship between those two measures tells the story you hope it does.

Chancey & Bruce: The Developmental Foundation

Executive function matters enormously. It is not, however, the whole picture of a young child’s development.

A child may have strong self-regulation and genuine gaps in auditory memory. Another may be highly verbal but show fine motor development that is lagging behind what her work with Montessori materials will eventually demand. A third may have receptive language well ahead of his expressive language — a gap that an attentive teacher might sense without being able to name. Without a careful look at the full developmental landscape, we respond to what we can see and miss what lies beneath.

This is what Chancey & Bruce address.

I wrote at length about Chancey & Bruce recently, so I will not retrace that ground in full here. The short version: founded in the early 1980s, they have spent nearly fifty years developing and refining a developmental screening system that is now among the most thorough and trustworthy available to early childhood programs. Their one-on-one assessment — conducted by trained screeners and drawing on input from parents and teachers as well — profiles children across nine developmental pathways: fine motor, gross motor, visual discrimination, visual memory, auditory discrimination, auditory memory, receptive language, expressive language, comprehension, and social-emotional maturity.

If you have spent time in a Montessori classroom, these domains will feel like old friends. They are the neurological foundations — the architecture of learning rather than its surface products — that our environment is specifically designed to build. Chancey & Bruce is not measuring something foreign to us. They are looking carefully at the very capacities we spend years nurturing.

What the Three Together Can Tell You

Here is what I find most compelling about using these tools in combination.

The DERS establishes a foundation at the classroom level. It asks whether the environment a school has created is, in fact, a Montessori environment in any deep sense — one with the structural integrity and fidelity to principle that the research associates with strong developmental outcomes. It is the input measure. It gives school leaders an honest evaluation of the conditions they are providing before asking what those conditions are producing.

The MEFS then measures the most significant outcome — the development of executive function — in the children who have been living and working in that environment. If the DERS is asking whether we are doing what Montessori intended, the MEFS is asking whether it is working. The relationship between the two, tracked honestly over time, is one of the most meaningful things a Montessori school can know about itself.

The Chancey & Bruce screening widens the lens to ensure that no child falls through the gaps. It provides breadth — a careful developmental portrait of the whole child across all the foundational domains, with the nuance that comes from triangulating screener observation, teacher input, and parent perspective. A child who scores well on the MEFS but has unaddressed gaps in auditory processing may be working harder than she needs to in order to keep pace with the phonemic awareness work that comes naturally to her peers. A child whose executive function is growing beautifully may still need extra time and guidance in fine motor development before certain Montessori materials will be accessible to her in the ways they are intended to be. The Chancey & Bruce screening catches what the MEFS, by design, does not pursue.

Together, the three tools give a school what it has rarely had. The DERS tells you whether your environment is what you believe it to be. The MEFS tells you whether your children are developing the self-regulatory capacities that Montessori environments are specifically designed to build. Chancey & Bruce ensures that you see each child whole — not just the cognitive self-management capacities that aggregate data can reveal, but the full developmental picture that individualization requires.

For school leaders, the aggregate story matters as much as the individual one. A school that can show, over multiple cohorts, that high-fidelity Montessori environments — as measured by the DERS — produce children with measurably growing executive function — as measured by the MEFS — is doing something rare and significant. It is building an evidence base for what Montessori education actually does. That evidence answers questions that philosophy alone cannot answer, meets families where they are, and gives boards and accreditors the outcome data they are increasingly asking for.

This summer, we will be hosting a webcast that brings all three tools into direct conversation. We will look at how the DERS, the MEFS, and the Chancey & Bruce system can be used together as a coherent assessment strategy — how they relate to each other, what each one reveals that the others do not, and how school leaders can begin to build this kind of systematic evidence-gathering into the rhythms of their programs. I hope you will join us. Details on how to register will be forthcoming.

To Wrap Up

Montessori herself was a scientist. She measured things. She observed with precision. She was always in the service of understanding the child more deeply rather than confirming what she already believed. I do not think she would have been suspicious of tools like these. I think she would have been glad we finally have them.

The most important work still happens in the classroom. It always has, and no assessment changes that. But tools that look carefully at the very things we most care about — that see what we see through lenses we can trust — deserve a serious look from every Montessori school committed to knowing its children well and demonstrating that commitment to the world.

Copyright 2026 The Montessori Foundation

Families navigating the early childhood years are juggling a stack of major life transitions all at once: a new baby, a new identity as parents, new care decisions, new housing needs, and new financial math. It can feel like you’re sprinting through a season that’s supposed to be sweet. The good news is that you don’t need a perfect plan—you need small, repeatable planning moves that lower stress and keep options open. It’s also normal to feel like you’re constantly reacting instead of choosing. Early childhood has a way of making even simple tasks (like running an errand) feel like a logistical operation. That doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong; it means your life has more moving parts now.

What Helps Most

The early childhood years get easier when you treat change like a series of “mini-projects,” not one giant life overhaul. Pick the next transition on the horizon, name the emotional load and the practical tasks, then take one concrete step this week. Repeat. Confidence builds faster than overwhelm.

Transition Map You Can Actually Use

Below is a simple way to see what’s changing—and what to do without trying to solve your whole life in one weekend.

A Home That Fits the Next Chapter

Sometimes the “right” home move isn’t about square footage—it’s about how your days work: space for strollers, a calmer bedtime setup, an easier commute, or being closer to trusted support and childcare. When families do decide to buy, the mortgage structure matters because early childhood expenses (childcare, preschool tuition, medical costs, constant replacements of tiny shoes) can be intense. A fixed-rate 30-year mortgage is often chosen because it spreads the cost over a longer term, which can help keep monthly payments more manageable while you’re also covering those ongoing kid-related costs.

Childcare Is a Decision, Not a Personality Test

When you’re touring programs, it’s easy to get swept up in branding or other parents’ certainty. Bring it back to fit: safety, warmth, reliability, and whether the environment matches your child’s temperament. If you’re in the Bay Area and looking for a place that many parents describe as a strong early foundation, Montessori School of San Francisco is positioned as a child care center serving infants, toddlers, and preschoolers in a fun, safe, and friendly environment. Their program blends traditional Montessori methods with preschool academics, they offer year-round programming, and they highlight a warm teaching staff that can feel like an extended family for longtime parents. For families who value independence, steady routines, and hands-on learning, it can be the kind of early start you’re glad you found early rather than later.

A Small How-To That Reduces Overwhelm Fast

• Pick the week’s constraint: childcare coverage, sleep, meals, money, or work deadlines.
• Name the one outcome you want: “Nobody panics when daycare closes,” or “We eat dinner without chaos for 3 nights.”
• Do the one scheduling action: add dates, confirm coverage, request time off, or book a tour.
• Do the one money action: set a small transfer, pay a deposit, cancel an unused subscription, or update a budget line.
• Do the one relationship action: one appreciation + one request (“Thank you for bedtime; can you also handle Tuesday pickup?”).
• Prepare one friction-saver: a grocery order, a packed daycare bag, a backup sitter text, or a meal prep shortcut.
• Stop. Anything beyond this is optional.

One Resource Worth Bookmarking

For childcare decisions—especially when you’re comparing centers and trying not to second-guess everything—Child Care Aware of America has a practical Child Care Center Checklist you can take to tours and use to compare options side by side. It prompts you to look at health practices, staff communication, and quality indicators you might forget to ask about when you’re in the room. It’s also useful if you’re touring virtually, because it turns a fuzzy impression into concrete notes.

FAQ

How early should we start looking for childcare or preschool?

If you can, start earlier than you think—waitlists and enrollment cycles vary by city and program. Even a basic shortlist and a few calls can prevent a last-minute scramble.

How do we plan financially when costs keep changing?

Use ranges instead of exact predictions. Build a “known costs” list (tuition, diapers, insurance) plus a buffer line for the unknowns, and update monthly.

What if we disagree on the “right” choices (care, housing, work schedules)?

Treat it like a joint design problem: define non-negotiables, list tradeoffs, then test the least risky option first—a trial period, temporary schedule change, or revisiting the decision in 90 days.

How do we support our relationship when we’re exhausted?

Lower the bar and keep it consistent: a weekly 10-minute check-in and one small act of care goes further than rare “big” date nights.

Conclusion

Early childhood transitions are packed because so many systems change at once: routines, identity, money, space, and time. The path through isn’t heroic productivity—it’s steady, small planning steps that reduce decision load and protect your family’s energy. Pick one transition to focus on, make one move this week, and let momentum do the rest. You’re not behind—you’re building the next chapter in real time.

Charlene Roth is the founder of Safetykid.info, a resource dedicated to helping parents and caregivers create safe, engaging, and skill-building environments for children. With a focus on practical advice and family-friendly projects, Charlene is passionate about fostering creativity and teamwork within the home while ensuring the well-being of every child