Readiness

With regard to children, perhaps no other word has entered our vocabulary in such a confusing way as readiness. Readiness usually means a state in which a child can perform a particular task or tasks successfully at a certain age in a school setting. Notice that the definition is dependent on someone selecting the tasks and defining what successful means. If we define cutting paper as a readiness task, cutting paper successfully reveals a child's readiness for a place that values paper cutting. In this scenario there is no doubt, it is the child who must meet the expectations of the environment. Readiness, then, can also mean the ability to meet  the performance expectations of others. One may ask, so what is wrong with that? Life is about meeting expectations of others all the time. That's fine for those of us who participate consciously in the system. But development follows no one's timetable except the one programmed in the child at conception. Development is a way of looking at children that's based on discovering their inner life. By observing the needs and interests displayed by the child's behavior, we can infer the content of that psychic life. What activities do children repeat; which ones hold their attention. Do any activities lead to concentration?

Such interests were observed more that eighty years ago by Dr. Montessori who discovered these interests and called them sensitive periods. Simply stated, these are periods in a child's life when his attention is drawn to certain stimuli to the exclusion of all others to achieve a certain determined characteristic. Once achieved, the sensitive period disappears. We know the existence of a sensitive period when something in its environment frustrates its inner workings. The reaction is violent and filled with despair and can seem without cause. There are several sensitive periods for the first stage of life, roughly birth to six years of age. Witness the infant who stares at faces, or focuses on the lips of a person speaking. Or witness the child  who spends hours putting things in containers and taking them out. The sensitive period for language, the most awe-inspiring of them all, occurs from birth till approximately six. There are others such as the sensitive period for movement, perfection of the senses, fascination with small objects, observation of social rules and the tendency to observe and abstract.       

Why has the child been programmed in this way? I think it is because the child is protected from doing things he is not ready to do and drawn to focus on things he can do. If the child is programmed by nature to focus on what it can do, by engaging in those activities, the message she gets is positive and encouraging. Is it necessary to state the message the child gets when engaging in activities she is not ready to do. It might be called maximizing potential.  The child is protected from well-meaning adults who might want children to hold pencils at 18 months of age. Follow these sensitive periods and environments can be created that maximize children's potential; ignore them and substitute adult notions and we get what David Elkind warns us of, the 'hurried' child. Readiness, when read as observing children's sensitivities, can provide us a key, read as preparing children to fit molds, it provides us a dead end of frustration for our children. Maybe readiness should mean our moment of willingness to see our children as they really are.