A little about how I got interested in ‘‘childhood development’’

I did not begin studying children through a textbook.

I began by watching them.

For more than a decade, I have worked closely with children—teaching them, correcting them, comforting them, challenging them, watching them develop, and, perhaps most importantly, paying attention to what changed their behavior.

I became an instructor in 2017, although I had already been assisting with children regularly for several years before that. Over time, I worked with hundreds of children across different ages, personalities, family structures, temperaments, developmental needs, and behavioral patterns.

My work eventually extended far beyond teaching martial arts.

I became interested in why one child responded immediately to a certain tone while another shut down.

Why some children appeared confident in one environment and completely different in another.

Why a child described by their parent as “difficult” could walk into my classroom and behave as though that description had never belonged to them.

Why some children needed firmness, while others needed explanation before firmness could even become meaningful.

Why changing a single sentence could sometimes produce a completely different response.

And why, repeatedly, the way an adult perceived a child seemed to influence the way that adult spoke to them—and, eventually, the way the child behaved around that adult.

I started developing theories long before I knew that psychology already had names for many of the things I was observing.

Years later, when I began examining developmental psychology, neuroscience, attachment research, and theories of learning more seriously, I discovered something fascinating:

Many of the patterns I had independently noticed in children had already been studied for decades.

Albert Bandura demonstrated through his famous observational-learning experiments that children do not learn behavior only through direct instruction; they also learn by watching the behavior of others. His Bobo doll experiments became foundational to what developed into Social Learning Theory and later Social Cognitive Theory. Children exposed to aggressive adult models were more likely to reproduce aspects of the aggressive behavior they observed.

That research gave academic language to something I had watched repeatedly:

Children are always studying us, including when we believe we are not teaching them.

John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth's foundational work on Attachment Theory examined the significance of the child's relationship with their primary caregivers, including the caregiver's role as a source of security from which the child begins exploring the world. Modern research continues to find an association between sensitive, responsive caregiving and attachment security; a 2024 meta-analysis examined more than 22,000 parent-child relationships across 174 studies.

This helped give scientific structure to another observation that appears repeatedly throughout my work:

Before young children can independently interpret the world, they frequently interpret the world through the people they trust.

Psychologists also have a specific term for this: social referencing.

When infants and young children encounter something uncertain or unfamiliar, they may look toward the emotional reactions of a caregiver and use those reactions as information about how they themselves should respond. Research into social referencing has demonstrated that another person's facial expression and emotional response can influence how an infant approaches an ambiguous situation.

So when I write in this book that your child may notice the slight change in your face, body, voice, or behavior when you enter an unfamiliar environment, I am not suggesting that children possess some mystical ability to read adults.

I am describing a developing brain collecting information.

Then there is regulation.

Throughout this book, I use words such as anchor because they best describe what I have witnessed in practice. Academically, however, much of what I am referring to belongs to the study of co-regulation and the development of emotional self-regulation.

Babies are not born possessing the mature regulatory systems of adults. Early regulation develops partly through interaction with caregivers. A systematic review examining parent-infant interaction, cortisol regulation, and vagal regulation found substantial evidence connecting caregiver interaction with the developing regulation of infants' emotional and physiological states.

In simpler terms:

Before children know how to bring themselves back, someone usually has to repeatedly show them what “coming back” feels like.

Language is another major foundation of my approach.

I have always spoken extensively to children.

Not because I believed a two-year-old intellectually understood every word I said, but because I noticed something extraordinarily consistent:

Children who were given explanations appeared to accumulate reference points.

Something happened once.

We spoke about it.

Then it happened again.

And the second time, it was no longer entirely foreign.

Developmental psychology gives us several useful frameworks for understanding this.

Lev Vygotsky proposed that language begins as a social tool between people and is gradually internalized as a psychological tool within the individual. Later research examining toddlers between approximately 14 and 36 months found associations between language development and developing self-regulation, supporting the idea that words can gradually become tools children use to organize their own behavior.

Longitudinal research has similarly found relationships between children's developing language abilities, their expression of anger, and their use of regulatory strategies.

This is one reason I place so much importance on explaining.

Naming.

Connecting.

Revisiting.

Giving a child words for something they previously experienced only as sensation.

The adult may initially say:

You're frustrated.

Eventually, the child learns:

I'm frustrated.

Those two sentences look almost identical.

Developmentally, they represent an extraordinary transition.

One voice came from outside.

The second came from within.

This book also repeatedly discusses the danger of assigning identities to temporary behavior.

“You're bad.”

“You never listen.”

“You're difficult.”

“You're aggressive.”

“You're shy.”

Psychology does not allow me to responsibly claim that saying one sentence to a child will permanently create their personality. Human development is far more complex than that.

But research into parental attribution gives us a serious reason to pay attention to the stories parents repeatedly construct about their children.

Parental attribution research examines the explanations adults develop for children's behavior. A large body of work has demonstrated relationships between the way parents attribute intention or responsibility to their children, their subsequent emotional and behavioral responses toward those children, and children's behavioral outcomes.

This distinction is essential to my philosophy.

There is an enormous psychological difference between thinking:

My child behaved badly in this situation.

and:

My child is bad.

The first leaves room for development.

The second begins constructing a character.

And whether that character is eventually internalized directly by the child or indirectly reinforced through thousands of interactions, I believe adults should be extraordinarily careful about the identities they repeatedly place onto developing human beings.

There is another body of research particularly relevant to this book: scaffolding.

Scaffolding describes the temporary structure an adult provides when a child cannot yet independently perform, understand, or regulate something. As the child's competence grows, that external support can gradually decrease. Decades of parent-child research have examined this process in relation to language, cognition, executive functioning, and other developmental abilities.

This is perhaps the academic concept closest to a sentence I return to repeatedly:

Do not punish a child for failing to navigate a world you never explained to them.

Give them the map first.

Then teach them how to walk through it.

I want to make an important distinction before you continue reading.

I am not presenting myself as the inventor of attachment theory, neuroscience, developmental psychology, or behavioral science.

Nor am I suggesting that every personal observation I have made constitutes scientific evidence.

What I am presenting is something slightly different.

Observation came first for me. Research came afterward.

For years, I noticed patterns in children through direct practice.

I experimented with language.

I watched reactions.

I changed my tone.

I changed the order in which I gave instructions.

I watched what happened when I separated a child's behavior from their identity.

I watched what happened when I explained something before demanding it.

I watched children who supposedly “didn't listen” begin listening when the communication surrounding the instruction changed.

And then I began asking:

Why?

That question led me toward developmental psychology.

Toward attachment theory.

Social learning.

Social referencing.

Language development.

Emotion socialization.

Co-regulation.

Neuroplasticity.

Parental attribution.

Scaffolding.

And the development of self-regulation.

The research cited throughout this work is not included to decorate my ideas with scientific vocabulary.

It is here because wherever possible, I want to distinguish between:

what I have personally observed,

what I believe those observations mean,

and

what psychological research has independently demonstrated.

Those are not always the same thing.

And intellectual honesty requires knowing the difference.

But when years of observation repeatedly lead you toward a conclusion, and decades of developmental research independently point toward similar mechanisms, the overlap becomes worthy of serious attention.

This book exists inside that overlap.

It is where practice meets theory.

Where the classroom meets developmental psychology.

Where thousands of small interactions with children meet decades of research attempting to explain how human beings become who they eventually become.

I am still studying.

I expect that I always will be.

Because the more closely you study children, the more difficult it becomes to reduce them to simple rules.

They are simultaneously biological, emotional, cognitive, relational, environmental, and individual.

Two children can receive the same sentence and hear two entirely different things.

Which is precisely why parenting cannot simply be a collection of commands.

It requires observation.

Adjustment.

Understanding.

And an extraordinary amount of awareness.

The purpose of this book is therefore not to tell you how to control your child.

It is to help you understand the human being developing in front of you.

Because once you understand why something is happening, the question of what to do next becomes remarkably easier.

And that is where we begin.