On Regulation and the Work Beneath It
I have been thinking again about regulation.
Developmental research increasingly describes self-regulation as foundational across domains, cognitive, emotional, social, and motivational. It is difficult to find a strand of contemporary developmental psychology that does not position regulation as integrative infrastructure.
What has become clearer over time is that my encounter with regulation began long before I encountered the literature.
As a child, time outdoors organized attention without effort. Years later, during a period of transition, daily walks in a nearby nature preserve restored rhythm and clarity when other structures shifted. Stability returned not through willpower, but through repeated contact with place.
In 2016, a conversation with Michael Cohen gave conceptual shape to what had previously been experiential. His integration of Guy Murchie’s articulation of the 54 senses widened the sensory field beyond the familiar five. Vestibular orientation, proprioceptive awareness, spatial perception, dimensions often confined to clinical language, were understood as part of everyday ecological engagement.
His description of expeditionary education in Our Classroom Is Wild America was not abstracted from place. Learning was embedded in watershed, soil, seasonal cycles, and the knowledge of local trades. Natural science began with the immediate region rather than distant examples. He described the effects of this immersion as restorative and, at times, rehabilitative.
What I recognized, particularly as we began homeschooling near Yellowstone National Park, was its preventative potential. Rather than waiting for dysregulation to require repair, we designed regulation and restoration into the structure of primary and middle school education from the beginning. Study of local ecology, engagement with ranchers and farmers, skiing, fishing and camping, provided us with sustained participation in the rhythms of our region formed the environmental conditions in which academic learning unfolded. Participation preceded abstraction.
Over years of home-based education and professional observation, the pattern repeated. When regulatory conditions stabilized through rhythm, relational steadiness, and ecological orientation, academic skills strengthened without force. When regulatory strain increased, abstraction narrowed first.
The foundations of literacy, mathematical reasoning, and scientific thinking appear less disembodied than they are often presented. Narrative coherence, sequencing, spatial reasoning, and pattern recognition emerge from a body that knows where it is.
Regulation seems to be the quiet layer beneath it all.
The research now names what long observation suggested.
I am continuing to trace that throughline.