Do you remember the first time that you watched Bambi, I mean the old version
of Bambi, or sat with a child on your lap with a picture book with the most
exquisite watercolor illustrations, those soft greens, misty blues, the
warm glow of a farmhouse, a dusk.
Now think about what's on screen next time you walk past a child watching something.
Chances are it's loud, it's bright, and it's fast.
Characters are bouncing off the walls, colors are screaming at you, and the
scene changes before you've even had time.
To realize what's just happened.
There's something uncomfortable about that comparison, isn't there?
It is for me, and I don't think that we should be brushing that off.
Today
I wanna talk about beauty, what it does for children, what we've
lost and what we can do about it.
Because this isn't just about aesthetics,
the research actually tells us that there are real consequences
for children's developing brains.
We used to know how to make things beautiful for children.
Cast your mind back to the old shows.
Now, some of you might be a bit young for this, but you can
always look these up on YouTube.
We used to watch things like Heidi and the Waltons, the Little House
on the Prairie, even something like the Teletubbies, right?
And those early Disney films.
The colors were warm and they were muted.
The pacing was slow enough for a child to actually feel something.
The illustrations were gorgeous, hand painted, carefully composed, full of
detail that really rewarded a second look.
. I recently saw a wonderful article on Substack, which actually
sparked this whole recording.
It was called The Colors of Childhood by Bahaus.
Crayola and the History of the Ugly Primary, and I want to
encourage every parent and teacher out there to go and read it.
I'll leave a link for you in the show notes,
because it traces exactly how we have arrived at this world of garish
primary colors, dominating children's spaces, products, and screens.
And it made me think, and I, I really hope it'll make you think too,
the shift didn't happen overnight.
But somewhere along the way, the assumption took cold that children needed
things to be louder, brighter, faster, to hold their attention, and the children's
media and product industry ran with it.
And if you walk into most early childhood classrooms today, you will
find red chairs, yellow tables, blue shelves and orange rug, all at full
saturation, all competing with each other, primary colors everywhere.
And we've just accepted this as normal as right, even.
But is it what the research actually says?
Let's start with screens.
Because this is where things get serious.
Now, a landmark study published in Pediatrics, I'll leave a link for you
in the show notes, found that just nine minutes of watching a fast-paced cartoon
was enough to significantly impair a four year old's executive function.
And the ability to focus.
That's to regulate themselves, to remember instructions and to solve problems.
Compared to children who either watched a slower education program or who
simply just drew for the same amount of time, nine minutes, that's nothing.
The researchers also noted that it wasn't just the pace, it's also the fantastical
and unpredictable nature of a content.
When a child's brain constantly has to orientate itself to new
and unexpected impossible events.
It depletes cognitive resources.
There's nothing left for the task of actually thinking.
Think about what Cocomelon's doing.
The constant singing the scene changes every few seconds.
The hyper saturated colors, the relentless, cheerful chaos.
Compare that to Puffin Rock narrated gently by Chris O'Dowd following
real animals through the seasons.
The contrast isn't subtle, and here's the thing that concerns me
most.
Children who are regularly overstimulated by fast-paced content
find it increasingly hard to engage with slower paced activities in the real world.
Things like reading or completing puzzles, or listening to the teacher.
Their brain gets calibrated to expect constant stimulation, and then everything
else by comparison seems boring.
Now, let's talk about color because it's not just about screens,
it's also about the rooms that children are learning in too.
Research conducted with preschoolers found that playing on a colorful surface showed
significantly more disruptive behaviors.
Like frustration, difficulty concentrating, dropping things,
losing track of what they were doing compared to children just
playing on a plain white background.
The researchers concluded that this excess of bright contrasting hues was
simply hijacking children's attention.
Their brains simply couldn't filter it out.
A further study showed that children in heavily decorated classrooms.
Actually achieved lower scores than children in more sparsely decorated ones.
And that reminds me of looking at classrooms in Finland.
I've always noticed that they really are undecorated, very sparsely decorated, and
I wondered if that doesn't have something to do with their high learning scores.
Now, brain research also tells us that using more than six colors in
a classroom environment can distract learners negatively and affect
their ability to absorb information.
And yet if you look at the average early childhood classroom, I'm talking
about the walls, the furniture, the displays, uh, the rugs, the storage boxes.
You'll count far more than six competing colors before you've
even reached the book corner.
Soft.
Blues and greens on the other hand are consistently linked to reduced
anxiety, better concentration, and greater sense of calm.
Gentle muted tones don't fight for attention.
They allow the attention to settle somewhere meaningful.
In classical education, we talk about the true, the good and the
beautiful as things worth pursuing.
Not as luxuries, but as necessities for a fully formed human being.
Beauty is not frivolous.
It's formative when a child spends their day surrounded by beautiful things,
gentle illustrations, natural materials, thoughtful colors, stories told at
a pace that allow them to breathe.
Something.
Is being cultivated in them, a sense of what's worth attending to,
a capacity for stillness.
When we fill every surface and every screen with noise and brightness and
movement, we are not enriching children.
We are overwhelming them, and over time we may be making it harder for them to
find the quiet things beautiful at all.
It's worth talking about at home in our classrooms and in our choices
we make about what we put in front of children every single day.
If this has got you thinking, and I hope it has, I'd love you to head over
to Blooming Curious to the blog where I've written an article on how to create
inspiring indoor spaces for children.
I'll leave a link for you in the show notes.
It comes also with a free download, which allows you to think about
how you set up your indoor spaces for the children that you teach
because our children deserve spaces that are calm, that are considered,
and that are genuinely beautiful.
Let's start there.
If you enjoyed today's episode, I'd love you to subscribe
if you're here on YouTube or if you're listening on the podcast,
follow along and if you find anything that I have to say interesting or
just they gives you something to think about, then leave a review and
share it with someone that you know.
That's the only way actually that we help the show to grow.
That would be awesome if you could do that and leave a review too.
So until next week, take care of yourself and be blooming.
Curious.