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Schools in the United States have severely curtailed or eliminated physical education and performing arts programming because of the need to score higher on standardized tests in order to receive federal funding under the No Child Left Behind law. In order to learn thinking skills, it is believed that children should sit still, keep quiet, obey instructions, and the like. This takes a toll on the body. Children often endure sitting for long hours, not being able move or stretch, or to go to the bathroom when needed. They are expected to know how to "behave" in these ways and are likely censured if they do not.
Thought processes - what standardized tests are supposedly assessing - can be constricted in a constricted body. School work occurs in these more or less stationary, more or less sedentary situations. In this sense at least, schools prepare us for what it might be like to hold a white collar job later (more on embodied work in a later blog post). After a while, even when children have an opportunity to move in their free time, they are likely to avoid it: vegging out in front of a video display or texting on the cell phone seem easier and their bodies mistakenly believe that this is the only means of rest and recovery.
The price paid for ignoring the body - its movements and senses -- is the festering of physical and mental disease and dysfunction. Hence the current epidemic of childhood obesity and diabetes. As explained in previous entries in this blog series, the key ingredient in being able to move and feel is the enhancement and development of our body sense. And our body sense awareness helps us to regulate what we need: activity, rest, food, or stimulation. Body sense and self-regulation leads to better health, clearer thinking, and a greater sense of well-being in adults and children alike. Body sense is easily lost while growing up in technological societies with an emphasis on in-the-head thinking. This is because body sense is a skill, like math and reading, and must be actively maintained, cultivated, taught, and renewed to sustain well-being.
If you think mental processes are independent of body function, think again. Body sense is the best and foremost indicator of success in school and self-control. It turns out that the facility of preschool and elementary school children to touch their head and toes in response to verbal commands is strongly correlated with measures of behavioral inhibition, self-control, attention, and remembering in the classroom.
Children need to move their bodies in order to learn. All children fidget during cognitive tasks in which they are required to sit still at their desks, and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) children move around even more. These movements, however, improved children's ability to learn and to remember. Researchers, therefore, do not recommend interventions to reduce body movement. They promote the surprising and counterintuitive idea of letting kids wiggle and move about during class. Instead, they suggest making complex tasks simpler and using aids such as memory cards, information key rings, and audio devices to aid retention.
Preschool children who were enrolled in a creative dance movement program as part of their Head Start experience had greater gains in social competence and more reductions in behavior problems than children who were given a cognitively-based program of learning to control attention that did not include a body sense component.
And you don't have to have a separate class devoted to movement. Introducing movement with awareness into otherwise sedentary classrooms has beneficial effects on both social and intellectual development for both normal and developmentally delayed children.
Elementary school children who took physical education classes requiring vigorous activity that met the Healthy People 2010 guidelines (for people engaging in moderate activity, the guidelines specify 30 min per day for at least 5 days per week and, for those doing vigorous activity, 20 min per day for at least 3 days per week) had better grades than children who did not meet these standards. Vigorous activity is defined as participation in an aerobic activity at an intensity which causes sweating and puffing.
The advantage of vigorous activity, or moderate activity over longer periods, as defined by the guidelines, is that one cannot ignore one's body sense in these conditions. You have to remember to breathe, you can't ignore the exertion and fatigue of muscles nor the sweat dripping off your body. The key ingredient is not exercise per se but how exercise can enhance the body sense.
This is confirmed in a study showing that yoga meditation training for children has similar effects as vigorous exercise. ADHD children, especially, were able to reduce their anxiety, concentrate better in school, and have less interpersonal conflict after only 6 weeks of regular yoga meditation. Anything that enhances body sense is likely to have the same or similar effects.
Restorative natural environments are an especially important means of enhancing body sense in children, and most especially for children who suffer from the effects of stress and trauma. With increasing urbanization, increasing threats of crime against children such as kidnapping and molestation, the opportunities for children to freely contact the natural world are becoming more limited. This has recently been called "nature deficit disorder" (Louv, R. (2005). Last Child in the Woods: Saving Our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder. Algonquin Books) and has led to calls for more outdoor free play. Being outside in nature enhances and expands our sense of self, puts our worries in perspective, calms the mind and soothes the spirit.
Access to green areas such as playgrounds, parks, and nearby countryside has been shown to enhance cognitive functioning, reduce stress, improve sensory and motor skills, and ameliorate the symptoms of ADHD in children. The body is alive and well when children are getting hands dirty, smelling plants, running through grass, climbing trees, walking in the surf, listening to birds, and watching the clouds roll by or the stars twinkle.
Even if children can't regularly be in a natural environment, one of the most accessible ways for children to contact nature is through animals. Animals have a special appeal to children who love pretending to be an animal, imitating animal movements and sounds, playing with and cuddling pets, going to zoos and farms. Research shows that these encounters enhance self-awareness and the body sense (Melson, G. F. (2001). Why the wild things are: Animals in the lives of children. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.).
The child who pretends to be a turtle, for example, knows that she is not a turtle which encourages an awareness of their own bodies and how they differ from the animals'. Yet, at the same time, the child isn't merely thinking about a turtle but rather becoming the turtle in a fundamentally embodied way by getting on all fours, putting a cover over their bodies, stretching and contracting their necks, arms, and lets, etc.
We could all use a dose of being more child-like to enhance our body sense and subsequent well-being. Our perception of adult responsibilities may not permit such indulgence. This is unfortunate. In our zeal to train and educate children, however, let's not take away their opportunity to feel and to move, to play, and to use their bodies in creative and inspiring ways.
