THE SENSITIVE PERIODS

As the child’s mind moves from chaos to order – her mathematical mind finding patterns and establishing a classification system for sensory input – she is drawn during very specific intervals to certain activities. These sensitive periods begin at birth while the mind is most acutely myelinizing its processes, and exist only for limited periods.

The child’s senses are being developed even in the uterus. At as early as eight weeks the sense of feeling is evident in the foetus, and by 32 weeks the entire body of the child in utero is sensitive to heat and pressure. Smell and taste develop almost simultaneously, the nose between eleven and fifteen weeks, and the taste buds from thirteen to fifteen. These senses are exercised by the aromas of the amniotic fluid that surrounds the child in the womb. The ear begins its development at eight weeks, and by eighteen weeks the bones of the inner ear and its nerve endings are complete enough to hear the sounds of the mother’s heartbeat and blood flow. Upon the completion of the ear around the 24^th week, the baby is able to distinguish between muffled sounds through the womb – voices, music, etc. Sight for the child is the last to develop, the eyes remaining closed until roughly 26 weeks. From the small amount of light penetrating the walls of the womb the child’s eye begins its exercise, and by 33 weeks the pupils are already able to dilate and contract.

Because of the work of the sense organs in the womb, the child is born with full faculty of her senses. But her development is far from complete, and though the senses themselves are fully functional, they are far from being optimised. The child must continue her work to perfect the usage of these senses, and so therefore must strive for ever more experience and testing of her capabilities. From the very earliest, then, will the child need to explore her environment, especially because the timed and timely development of the senses, in conjunction with the receptiveness of her Absorbent Mind, highlights specifically periods of sensitivity toward distinct types of learning.

Within the time-frames of these sensitivities an effortless learning is admitted for the child. She is guided through these periods by an instinct to acquire functions respective to each of the Sensitive Periods, and growth and development in these areas is by no means vague. Each Sensitive Period has its own lesson and focus, and the child longs during these times to move from conquest to conquest following an inwardly driven sense of flow. “On the basis of this sensitivity, the child is able to establish an extraordinarily intense relationship between himself and the outside world, and from this moment on he finds everything easy, inspiring, alive.”¹ There is an irresistible urge for activity on her part, and if her passionate interest is given the freedom to be seen through, the Sensitive Periods are associated with emotional contentedness. The child works with intense focus, compelled toward repeating a task by a supra-conscious urge – a drive that transcends both brain and mind; pure instinct – until she feels her new skill attained, her Sensitive Period satisfied. Accomplishment in this undertaking is followed by a restful state, perhaps even joyful. It may also compel some down-time to assimilate the learning gained, but subsequent actions can then be veritably put on “auto-pilot” until and while the child’s focus is redirected according to the current Sensitive Period.

As Dr. Montessori says in The Secret of Childhood, “Man’s mind does not spring from nothing; it is built up on the foundations laid by the child during his sensitive period.”² Here especially is doing learning, and it is important that the child is allowed opportunity to explore the areas so fertile to her during these Sensitive Periods. This is also the time in the child’s life strongly within her plane for the Absorbent Mind, and work during these Sensitive Periods resolves incredibly the mylenization of her brain. The body is also strengthened through these processes, the resolve of which are both direct and indirect preparations for future developments. But the Sensitive Periods are limited in time – they are transitory, and peak once before waning toward a gradual but definite fading away. Once a period has passed, it is gone forever, and it is possible that it might even be skipped entirely if it is not accommodated for. If a Sensitive Period is, perchance, not catered for in the right time, optimal opportunity for ease of acquisition will be missed because “if the child has not had the chance to act in accordance with his inner directives during the periods of sensitivity, then he has missed the opportunity to acquire a particular ability naturally; and this opportunity has gone for ever.”³ It is not that the child can never in her life again gain these skills, but it will take a concentrated will and strong deliberation of effort to see them through, where during the Sensitive Period for that trait learning of it was fluid. Because, therefore, of the labour the child must needs expend after the Sensitive Period has passed to perfect those skills of her lacking areas, she may exhibit an indifference toward any of the actions associated with her best development.

Each Sensitive Period has its own lesson and focus, and though perhaps developments occur in sequential order, they often surface concurrently. There are four of these Periods:

• Order

• Development and refinement of sensory perception

• Movement

• Language

Every one of these Periods begins in the child prenatally with the development of the sensory organs, but each of these Periods has its own peak time and eventual fade. By roughly 4½ years, three of the Sensitive periods (Order, Refinement of Sensory Perception and Movement) have independently passed, and at around 6 the window for the fourth (Language) has gone as well.

Sensitive Periods by Age

ORDER

The child is keenly acute to the need for order early within the period of the Absorbent Mind because it is precisely this order that will enable her to make sense of the world around her. Order allows the child to classify ideas, see patterns and set sequence to events, and it is this ability to classify that defines the very mind itself. The child is establishing a sense of form and also the understanding that everything has a beginning, middle and end. She needs her routine, it will give her an orientation to her environment and new world.

This sensitive period for order peaks around 2-3 years of age, and it is the manifestation of this development that leads to the so called “Terrible Twos.” But if the child is not rushed and is given accommodation to her special needs in this period, she will come through it with a sense of tranquillity and security. The Sensitive Period fades at around 3½-4 years in the child.

DEVELOPMENT & REFINITION OF SENSORY PERCEPTIONS
(I made this word up)

The child can feel, smell, taste, hear and see even in the womb, so the child even from the moment of birth is an experiential being. It is in this post-birth time that the child undergoes the enrichment of her senses. In this period she gains knowledge through quantifiable response from experiment – only real experiences that manifest for the child herself will give her any positive benefit because, once again, doing is learning.

As in all Sensitive Periods, the child is instinctually driven toward her growth in acquiring increased functionality of her faculties. She is learning effortlessly in this period. Sensory input comes at first to this child unsorted and unrefined, but as she reached the second plane of her development, she begins to see patterns and classifications of things, and her development is not vague.

Because the senses are such personal tools for the child, it is important that these be individual lessons for her: personalised to her specific needs. The child must always remain fully stimulated during this time in order that she gain full advantage of her window for sublimated absorption. Through only exposure to exploration and experience in an enriched environment will the child’s natural drive for perfection during this sensitive period be quenched. This Period peaks at around 3 or 3½ years, and has faded mostly away by the age of four.

MOVEMENT

Throughout these Sensitive Period exercises, and indeed all of life, movement is crucially important. From a time well before birth has the young person been developing and refining her abilities in motion, and it is in her initial period that the child’s skills toward this end are firmly established.

The child from the first, even before she can move within a space, is able to move her head to explore an environment visually. She learns to support her head for a stable position from which to make her observations, and this is the very rudiment of balance for the child. Soon she discovers her hand as a tool of the mind, and she begins to refine her manual dexterity skills. From this start are all of her fine motor skills borne. She continues to make progress in her ability for support and balance, and soon she can be seen supporting herself on her hands in the prone position.

But from her curiosity for exploration, her desire to replicate the movements of the other people in her environment, and an inward drive for totality of movement inspired in this Sensitive Period, the child strives to locomote. Slow and clumsy lurchings and creepings lead to crawling, and through these deliberations the child’s gross motor skills are starting to become beneficially employed. At the same time the child has continued to further the refinement of her equilibrium, and she is eventually able to stand. Fine motor, gross motor, balance, equilibrium and inner motivation culminate in the child’s ability to walk.

And then even still are these skills further refined during this Sensitive Period until roughly 4½ years, when the window of opportunity fades for absolute ease of acquisition for skills in movement.

LANGUAGE

From nearly the 24^th week of prenatal development, roughly three months before she is even born, is the child able to distinguish sounds and sound patterns through the walls of the womb. The child is programmed early for recognition and understanding of language, and it is not late before she can recognise the utility of it. From even the instant of birth does the child have a capacity for communication – through crying and looking and reaching and body language – but in this Sensitive Period for Language it is not enough. As her mind becomes more classified in the period of the Absorbent Mind, so too becomes her thought process; and as her thought process grows in sophistication, her need and/or desire to share and interact with the social environment surrounding her intensifies. She is fascinated by words. She focus on the lips and faces of those who are speaking; she is fully absorbed in the analysis of sound. It is at this time that the child can flawlessly acquire new language, any and as many as are regularly spoken around her.

Somewhere in or around her first year, the child speaks her first word, short phrases by ~18 months, sentences ~2 years, and by 6 she has thousands of words. Somewhere between 4 and 4½ the child explodes into writing as a form of self-expression; at 4½-5 she experiments with her fascination for grammar and the power she has in words; and then with proper sentence construction at 5-5½. It is just subsequent to this time, ~6 years, that this last of the Sensitive Periods finally passes.