Body, Balance, and the Academic Mind

On what children reveal in natural environments, and why that gap between field and desk is information , not inconsistency.

This child was labeled and medicated, and their teachers had been given a settled picture of what they could and could not do. I was new enough to the school that none of that picture had reached me yet. What I saw was a child who was curious, drawn to music, with a gift for language and for holding a room. I followed that. I asked if they wanted to be more involved. The answer was yes.

This child took the lead role. On opening night the parents found me afterward. They were in tears. It was only then that I learned the history, the years of being told what this child could not do, the accumulated evidence for the wrong conclusion.

I had not employed a framework. I had simply been given enough freedom to make room for every child to participate, and I had followed this child's attractions rather than their limitations. What was a liability in one setting was an asset in ours. The environment had changed. The child had not.

I have carried that experience for decades. It became the first clear evidence of something I would spend thirty years learning to articulate: that what we call a child's capacity is never only about the child. It is always also about the conditions.

What I kept discovering, across years of outdoor teaching, was that natural environments do something specific. They reveal. A child in genuine relationship with physical place cannot perform competence they do not have, but they also cannot hide competence they do. What becomes visible in those conditions is more accurate information about who that child actually is than almost anything a standardized setting can produce. The natural environment is not just a pleasant alternative to the classroom. It can be a more honest one.

What the field revealed

Years later, teaching skiing and running outdoor school days in Wyoming, I watched the same inversion happen in different forms and with different children. A child who could not sustain attention in a classroom found their whole body organizing on a slope. A child described as unable to focus sat beside a creek for an hour in absolute stillness, tracking the movement of water. Children who had been labeled as dysregulated, distracted, difficult, found in physical and natural environments a quality of engagement that the indoor setting could not produce. But only when the adults in those spaces were willing to receive what they saw.

What I found most difficult was not the children. It was the assumptions the adults brought with them. The impulse to correct, to redirect, to manage, arrived unconsciously and quickly, imported straight from the indoor setting into the field. I learned to ask parent volunteers to come as observers rather than managers. To notice rather than intervene. To let what was happening finish before deciding what it meant. That shift in adult stance was often the difference between a child who opened and a child who closed again.

What the mountain was doing was not metaphorical. A slope demands honest physical negotiation. The body cannot perform competence it does not have. Weight must actually shift, balance must actually be found, the gradient must be read through the feet and responded to in real time. The nervous system is fully occupied with something real, something that gives immediate and accurate feedback, something that does not require sitting still or producing output on demand. In that environment, the children described as incapable of focus were often the most focused people on the hill.

Cross-country skiing in particular showed me what became possible when that observer stance held. It is a bilateral, rhythmic, full-body movement that demands continuous coordination between left and right sides, continuous proprioceptive adjustment, continuous reading of terrain through sensation. The body is doing something that closely mirrors the cross-lateral integration that underlies reading. I did not know that research then. I knew it as observation: children who skied regularly organized differently. Their attention had a different quality. Their capacity to sustain effort, to tolerate frustration, to return to something after distraction, looked measurably different from what their classroom teachers were describing.

That gap is where the frustration lives, for children and for parents. A child who skis for three hours without complaint but cannot sit at a desk for twenty minutes is not making a choice about where to apply effort. The nervous system is responding honestly to two different sets of conditions. But from the outside it looks like inconsistency, and inconsistency gets read as willfulness. The child begins to hear: you could do this if you tried. The parent begins to wonder if they are right. The child begins to wonder too. What gets lost in that wondering is the accurate explanation, which is not about effort or character at all.

Climbing showed something adjacent. A child on a wall is solving a spatial and physical problem under conditions of real consequence. The problem cannot be faked or performed. It requires genuine attention to the body's relationship with the surface, genuine tolerance for the moment of uncertainty before the next hold is found. Children who struggled with mathematical reasoning in the abstract often showed fluent spatial reasoning on a wall. The capacity was there. The medium had been wrong.

What the gap is telling you

If your child shows up differently in physical and natural settings than they do at a desk or in a classroom, that difference is not a mystery to be managed. It is information. It is the child's nervous system showing you, as honestly as it can, what conditions allow them to organize and what conditions work against them.

That information does not require a diagnosis to be valid. It does not require you to leave the school system or redesign your child's education. What it requires is language. The capacity to name what you are seeing accurately, so that when you sit across from a teacher or a specialist or a school administrator, you can say: my child is not inconsistent. My child is responding accurately to conditions. Here is what I have observed. Here is what they need.

The system will not always be able to provide it. Public education operates within real constraints, and accepting that it cannot fully align with your child is not a failure on anyone's part. But acceptance and advocacy are not the same thing. A parent who can read their child's developmental picture clearly, who has language for the gap between what their child shows in the field and what the school is measuring, is in a different position than a parent who has only the clinical explanation. The clinical explanation names what is wrong. The developmental one names what is needed. Those are different conversations, and they lead to different outcomes for children.