There was a moment recently that I have not been able to stop thinking about, because it was so ordinary that I could easily have missed it if I had been busy organising the next activity myself. We were sitting outside together on a picnic rug having a snack, surrounded by the sort of environment we often say we want children to experience more of. There were birds around us, a breeze moving across our skin, sunshine, grass underneath us and enough time for everybody to simply eat, talk and be together for a few minutes, yet some of the children seemed to find it incredibly difficult to remain inside that moment for any length of time.
Within what felt like no time at all, somebody needed to stand up and find a toy, somebody had wandered away from the group, somebody was already looking for what was happening next, and maintaining even a short conversation while eating seemed unexpectedly difficult. I was not watching children who needed a movement break after being forced to sit for too long, and I certainly was not wishing they would all become quieter or more compliant. I have spent years encouraging adults to understand that children need movement. What struck me was the difficulty moving in the opposite direction. It was as though their bodies had become so accustomed to seeking the next source of stimulation that simply being outside together did not feel like enough.
Then one little boy looked into the sky and noticed an aeroplane. He was genuinely excited by it and began trying to show the other children, but almost nobody looked up. They were already absorbed in whatever was pulling their attention elsewhere, and this little invitation he was offering them quietly disappeared. The aeroplane itself was not important, of course, but what happened underneath that moment felt important to me. He had noticed something in the wider world, become curious about it and then tried to draw another person into his experience. In his own small way, he was saying, “Come and see what I can see,” and I found myself thinking about how much human development sits inside something as simple as that.
When another person points to the sky and we follow their gaze, we are sharing attention. When we pause long enough to hear a bird call and wonder where it came from, we are practising sustained attention without anybody formally teaching it. When we notice that the breeze has changed or that the clouds suddenly look different, we are registering sensory information from the environment and allowing our attention to move beyond whatever immediate task has been placed in front of us. These experiences can seem insignificant because there is no obvious product at the end of them, but perhaps that is partly why they matter.
What happens when childhood becomes so busy, so stimulating and so full of the next thing that these quieter forms of noticing begin to happen less often?
Our children are growing up in a world where something else is almost always available. There is another activity, another toy, another show, another game, another appointment, another organised experience, another destination or another piece of information competing for their attention. Families are busy because life itself has become busy, and educators are working in environments where there can be enormous pressure to keep children engaged, entertained, learning, transitioning and moving through the day. I do not believe anybody deliberately decided that childhood should become this full. I think it happened gradually, until constant activity began to feel normal and the spaces in between began to feel uncomfortable.
The difficult question for me is what children may be getting fewer opportunities to practise while we fill so much of that space for them. We talk a great deal about mindfulness with children now, yet mindfulness can easily become another adult-directed task. We sit children down and ask them to take three breaths, notice their feelings, use a regulation card or listen to a scripted exercise, and while all of those things can have value, I sometimes wonder whether we are trying to teach children in five-minute activities what childhood itself can provide much more naturally through long stretches of ordinary time.
Being in the moment is not only about knowing how to breathe slowly. It is the capacity to stay with an experience long enough to notice it changing. It is hearing the second bird call after the first one. It is following the aeroplane until it disappears behind a cloud. It is remaining beside another person long enough for a conversation to develop rather than immediately needing something new. It is noticing that your own body has changed after running, that you are warm now, that you are thirsty, that your breathing feels different, or that sitting quietly suddenly feels comfortable after a period of movement.
Regulation is not the same as being still
This is where I think our conversation about regulation needs to become broader. Regulation is often reduced to the question of how we calm children down once they are already overwhelmed, yet healthy regulation is much more about flexibility than permanent calmness. Children should be able to move fast, become excited, climb, shout, explore and throw themselves wholeheartedly into play, but gradually we also want them to experience the other side of that rhythm. We want their bodies to know what it feels like to slow again, to orient towards a sound, to sit near another person, to recover after excitement and to remain connected to what is happening around them.
Nature offers an unusual setting in which that can occur because it gives children sensory information without necessarily placing constant demands on them. Leaves are moving but are not asking the child to respond. Clouds are changing without becoming another instruction. Birds appear and disappear. Wind changes direction. Light moves across the ground. The environment is alive and full of information, but much of it can simply be noticed rather than completed.
Research examining nature exposure in children and young people has increasingly explored this relationship between natural environments, attention, wellbeing and physiological arousal. Experimental studies have reported modest benefits for some areas of attention and executive functioning, while more recent research into nervous-system responses has identified patterns associated with lower sympathetic activity and higher parasympathetic activity during some forms of nature exposure. This does not mean that taking a child outside automatically regulates them, and the researchers themselves are clear that this area of science is still developing, but it does give us good reason to consider natural environments as more than simply somewhere children go to burn off energy.
Children need opportunities to practise shifting gears
The part that matters most to me is the ability to move between states. I do not want children who spend their day in one artificially calm state, because that is not how healthy development works. I want children who can run hard, laugh loudly, become excited, immerse themselves in play and then gradually learn that their body can move in another direction as well. They can stop because they heard something interesting, settle beside someone after a period of movement, watch something long enough to see what happens next, and notice how their own body feels as their energy changes.
This flexibility is much closer to what I think we should mean when we talk about regulation. Regulation is not a child looking calm enough for the adults around them. It is a developing ability to experience different levels of energy, emotion and sensory demand while gradually learning how to move between them and remain connected to themselves, to other people and to their environment.
This is why I do not want our response to children's growing busyness to become another carefully structured nature curriculum. We can take children outside and make nature every bit as busy and adult-directed as the rest of their day by giving them scavenger hunts, lists of objects to collect, worksheets to complete and activities that need to produce something at the end. There is nothing wrong with those experiences in moderation, but they are not the only way children learn to connect with the natural world.
Sometimes I think the more important experience is simply having enough time for something unplanned to become interesting. We can have the snack outside without an activity attached to it. We can stop walking because one child heard something in a tree. We can admit that we do not know what kind of bird it is and listen together to see whether it calls again. We can lie on the grass and notice whether the clouds are moving quickly or slowly. We can feel the difference between the sunny part of the garden and the shaded part without turning it into a formal lesson.
Those moments can look as though nothing particularly educational is happening, but perhaps something very important is happening. The child is discovering that ordinary experiences are worth attending to, that they do not need constant novelty in order for the world to remain interesting, and that another person's attention can become an invitation rather than an interruption.