Episode 142. Adults as Potential Obstacles in Development with Pilar Bewley

Welcome to the Good Shepherd and the Child Podcast, where we explore the spirituality of the Christian child through the method of the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd. I am your host, Carrie Mechile-Luzano. Today we have Pilar back on the podcast to continue this exploration of freedom and discipline and most specifically we are talking about how the adult can be an obstacle in development. Pilar is AMI Certified Guide for both primary and elementary and she's also a positive discipline facilitator. After spending over a decade teaching in Montessori classrooms, Pilar began homeschooling her children in 2019 and she has a passion for making Montessori education accessible, which inspired her to create mainly Montessori. So check out our show notes of how you can connect with Pilar. I hope you enjoy. Pilar, welcome back to the Good Shepherd and the Child Podcast. Thank you, Carrie. It's so lovely to be here. I love learning from you. So I'm excited to get to have this conversation with you and I really love this topic that we're going to be diving into. We're going to be talking about how us as adults need to keep from getting in the way from being the hindrance to development, right, becoming an obstacle. And I find that the more that I grow in this work, the more that I realize it is, it's us as the adults getting in the way of the children's natural growth, natural discovery of who they are, natural development of who the God designed them to be. And so it really takes that humbling stance, like Sophia called us the humble servants, right? So we have to totally take this humble stance before God and the child so that we don't become obstacles in their development. Absolutely. I am excited to talk to you more about that. I am too. It's a never ending work for any adult that wants to support children. So it's a really important topic. Thank you for helping me to share what I've experienced. So the quote from Montessori that will kind of springboard our conversation today is that every useless help is an obstacle to the child's development. And I know that Montessori here is talking about the full child, all that encompasses the child, their mind, their body, their soul, their emotions, all of it. And we look at all of that in Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, most particularly their spiritual development. So I would love to let's first explore what does useless help? What is the adult giving useless help? What does that mean? Like what does that even look like? Useless help is basically when the adult takes over and does something that the child feels capable of doing on their own. And like you said, it can be something emotional where it can be like regulating their own emotions or speaking out and holding their own boundary. It can be something physical like putting their socks on. It can be social like making a new friend or solving a problem, a disagreement in a classroom setting. Any of those, when we step in and we take over, we are infringing on the child's agency. And we are not allowing the child to do the work that they're developmentally driven to do. So that's what useless help is. I feel like with all the love in our hearts as adults, whenever we do this, we are telling the child that on some level, we don't feel that they are capable. Exactly. So tell me though, okay, you said if a child thinks they can do it themselves. So what if a child doesn't think they can do it themselves? Like they don't think they can put on this shirt by themselves. But we as the adult know that they are capable or would like to help them to struggle into that capability a little bit more. Is that the same useless help there as well? Or is it only when the child believes that they are capable? Yeah, I'm glad you bring that up because depending on the child's temperament and personality, some children are go-getters and they will stop at nothing to follow that development. But other children are more hesitant. It takes them a longer time to warm up or to believe in themselves, or they've had experiences in the past where they've tried something and it hasn't gone well and so now they're hesitant to do it again, to try it again, to put themselves out there. And so when we believe that the child needs our help or that they are incapable and therefore we do for them because we don't trust them, even though we are doing it with the best intentions, I always try to assume positive intent, right? I know most adults, if they're working with children, they want the best for the children that are in their care. But in both situations, when the adult doesn't step up because they think the child is not capable or when they step up and take over, in both situations, it is unnecessary help or useless help. And so we really have to observe what is driving the child or what is stopping the child and we have to observe what comes up for us, our own prejudices, our own stories, our own experiences from our childhood to stop ourselves. So a lot of what happens is the child believes they can do it. We know that child because we've worked with them, we know that they might not be able to do it to the extent that the child wants. But if we collaborate, if we work together and if we offer a little bit of scaffolding, then we can provide that healthy help, that useful help, to get the child to that point of success. So that's the middle ground. Vigotsky, who is a developmental scientist, he called it the zone of proximal development. That's that space that lies between what the child is able to do independently right now and what they want to do or what nature is driving them to do, but that they can't necessarily do it yet. And so that's where the useful help is. That's that little bit of scaffolding that forms a bridge. To help the child succeed. And for those children who feel incapable because whatever experiences they've had have sent the message that they're not capable of succeeding. And so they're no longer willing to try. This approach is especially powerful when you collaborate and you do it together. What's coming to mind right now is in the video Edison's Day, which is this monastery, parents and they video their, I guess he's probably like 18 months, two years old throughout his day. And all the things he's capable of doing, it's a really neat like 30 minute video. But there's this one scene where he is struggling to put on like a jacket or some article of clothing, I don't remember. And the mom's just sitting there watching him. And at some point when he, she notices, he kind of crosses that threshold of, okay, now I'm frustrated. She holds just a piece of the coat, just a piece of it so that it stops moving for him. So then he can put his arm the rest of the way through and put the red, you know, so that scaffolding of she helped him just enough so that then he can do it on his own. But she waited until he got to that moment of, okay, now we're going to start spiraling into frustration at this point. Exactly. Yeah. So allowing the child to reach frustration, but not letting frustration totally take over and impede progress. Yeah. Right. But allowing that moment of frustration is really important to develop mentally because frustration leads to futility. Futility is the realization that, okay, I can't yet do it 100% on my own. But now let's get creative and ask for help or try something new. And that's how the child grows, developmentally. And so, yeah, just offering that tiny bit of help once you realize that the child is reaching frustration and waiting and waiting some more and waiting some more. And while you're waiting, you're observing the child and you're observing yourself because a lot of big emotions are going to come up for you. Right. You might feel like, oh, I'm a bad parent because I'm not helping or, you know, fear stories like my child must be developmentally delayed because the neighbor can do this and they can't do it yet. So noticing all of those fear stories that come up, all of those prejudices and conditioning that come up, doing your work while you're waiting for the child to be doing their work. That's there's so many things you just said that I that I want to like tangent off onto. So I find it so important about what you were saying about frustration. I think as parents again, with all the love in our hearts or catechists or any adult in a child's life, we want to save them from what we consider negative things. So frustration, big emotions, failure, boredom, all of these things we want to save them from out of all the love in our hearts. And doing so, it is what like Montessori said, is a hindrance to development. It is a obstacle and a child's growth whenever we do that. There was a talk I listened to recently and the developmental psychologist, they were saying something along the lines of, "It is not our job to remove these things from a child's life. It is our job to be there with them during it." And I think that that's really huge because if we save them from these big things, you know, failure, frustration, all of those things, they will never learn that they are capable of hitting frustration and getting past it. Exactly. So again, we're communicating unintentionally, we are communicating, "I don't think you're capable." And we're saving them from this frustration, failure, hurt, pain, boredom, anger, all of those things. And then doing so, they're never going to learn their capabilities of getting past those. And those are all part of life. We will have all of those throughout life. And if we're never had the experience of getting past them from a very young age, from infancy on, with someone next to you, you know, like someone right there co-regulating with you, someone right there saying, "I'm right here with you. You can do big things. You can do hard things." It's just such a huge life lesson, right? Such a huge life lesson. Absolutely. It is the difference between reaching adolescence and adulthood and believing in yourself. Not because somebody has told you that you're great, but because you have had the experiences that show you that you're capable, that you're resilient, that you're competent. And it's the difference between being able to do that and reaching adolescence and adulthood, thinking that you're always having to depend on somebody else because you haven't been given the opportunities to work through these difficult, uncomfortable, hard feelings and situations that life has thrown your way. And so what's really important is to start with very manageable situations, like putting on a coat or a pair of socks when the child is little. And being that adult that is next to the child, like you said, just expressing that trust and that belief and that quiet presence. And as your child continues to grow, the challenges will be exponentially larger and the feelings will be much more complex. And if the relational dynamic stays the same, if we don't solve things for them and if we don't also check out and let them deal with it 100% on their own, then that child will know that they always have somebody to turn to for support, but that they're also very capable of solving their own problems. And so that's where we are no longer an obstacle, but we are a help. There's so much there. It's a huge topic. It is. It's a huge topic. But I love what you were saying, Polar, about how the parent really in these moments, when the child sitting there struggling, putting on their coat or whatever, for the parent to take a moment to look inside themselves and assess what emotions are coming up in me right now, for them to be honest with themselves so that whatever the motivation is behind to the unnecessary help, the useless help, can maybe be dispensed with, right, if we become aware of it. Exactly. I have a little three-part exercise that I like to do while I'm waiting. And it's the three Cs, which is catch it, challenge it, and change it. So let's say we are observing a toddler putting on their socks. So the first thing that might come up for us is, oh, my child doesn't have fine motor skills. Like I failed my child because they don't have fine motor skills. And the children I see on social media can put their socks on by themselves. And so catch it is notice what comes up, right? Catch that thought, that perception, that conditioning in the moment. So just notice what comes up. And then challenge it. So ask yourself, is it true? Is it true that my child doesn't have fine motor skills? And is it true that a two-year-old should have fine motor skills, right? Is it true that every two-year-old can put their socks on by themselves? Is it even true that that child that I saw on social media is actually putting on their socks by themselves? And it's not a video that's been spliced, right? Because don't believe everything you see. So just challenge it. Is it true? Those three words are so powerful. And sit with them for a moment while your child is struggling with the socks. And notice what comes up. And part of you might say, well, it is true because I saw it or it is true because my trainer told me, but is it true for your child? Is it true for you? Is it true for every single child, right? Question that. Challenge it. And then change it. So what is a new belief that better aligns with the reality that you want for your child and for yourself? So if you want a reality where you trust your child, a reality where you understand that your child is on their own timeline, then what is a new belief that you can create for yourself? And so that new belief might simply be flipping your old belief. So if your old belief is my child has poor fine motor skills for a two year old, your new belief might be my child is developing motor skills every day or my child is improving their motor skills every day, right? Choose a belief that you can embrace that you can lean into that feels approachable and hold that belief. I when I was first doing a lot of this work, I would write it down, I had sticky notes everywhere with all of my new beliefs because the reality is that the brain is always making up stories, is always creating new beliefs, that's the job of the brain, right? But then that the brain looks for evidence to confirm these stories that we have made up. And so in order to start seeing our child differently, we need to shift our beliefs so that our brain will start looking for that new evidence, right? So catch it, challenge it, change it. And the more you practice it, the quicker you can go through these steps while you are observing your child writing a paragraph or putting on their socks or you know learning to write their bicycle. I feel like that same concept can be applied to so much throughout our life, not just with our children. Oh, absolutely. It's for every relationship and for ourselves. Yeah, I mean, and I'm imagining, you know, as mothers, particularly, I mean, I shouldn't just limit it to others. As parents, I think we're particularly hard on ourselves. We are very easy for us to believe lies like, well, another mom would have been able to do this better. Those kind of lies that we believe, so catching, like you said, ourselves telling ourselves these lies so that we can change that narrative, right? Exactly. Even when they're about ourselves, it's, I think it's easier for us to do those three steps to catch it, challenge it, change it when it's regarding our child. But I think it's just as important to do it about ourselves as well because we have to trust that God chose you to be this child's mother, this child's father, this child's catacas, this child's whoever, for a reason. And at this point in your life is when you are learning this, not two years ago, you know, like there's, there's a purpose to all of that. And we have to trust that plan within it as well. Lean into that. Absolutely. Yeah. Absolutely. So, we have to trust that plan within our child's mother, that's what we have to trust. And we have to trust that plan within our child's mother, that's what we have to trust. inside of us, that spiritual connection that we have, that tells us that we do know what we're doing. And that even if we don't know what we're doing in the moment, right, if we don't have a solution right away, it's not always our job to fix things, to make things better, like you were saying, right? It's not always, it's not our job to make the child feel better. It's not our job to make the child put their socks on in the way that we think is correct or to solve a math problem in the way that we think is correct. It's our job to believe in the child, to trust in the child, to learn about the child, to believe in ourselves, to trust ourselves, and to learn the tools and the perspective shifts so that we can actually be of service. We're not of service when we do things for the child. We're of service when we trust the child, when we observe what they're capable of, and when we provide that scaffolding, when we notice that the child is ready for it. That's when we're of service, and that really comes from being able to follow that intuition, that inner knowledge. So it's really when we question ourselves, when we are right, when we catch it, challenge it and change it, we are tapping back in to that intuition, to that spiritual guidance that tells us that we don't have to navigate this alone, and that we know much more than we think we do. That's searcher, and I think that goes back to what you were saying at the beginning of, you know your child, or you know this child that's in front of you, you're the one that's been spending time with this child, you know, their, their carisms, their personality, and all of that. So you through observation will know when they've hit that moment of frustration, or if they feel that they can succeed, et cetera. So like trusting that you're the one that knows this child, or one of the people who knows this child best, right? That trust it's huge. That's, that's, that's important. Exactly. And also trust that you don't have to know everything about this child, especially if you're an educator, you're obviously not going to know what the child's going through at home and who they were from the time they were born, but trusting that you have inside what this child needs in order to feel trusted and supported. And I think what's really tricky is that most of us did not grow up feeling trusted. And so it's really hard to then turn around and look at a child and trust them because we didn't grow up feeling trusted, right? So we have to do the internal work first of learning to trust ourselves, finding that inner voice, that intuition, that spiritual connection so that we can then look at the child because the child is just out there, they're living their best life. They're not worried about all of these things that we worry about, right? And that we're dissecting. And so if we remember that we're not working by ourselves, it's not just us and the child. It's us, the child, and the child's God-given developmental timeline. That's, that is our co-teacher. I remember in my training, when we were in my three to six training, our trainer said, "You're not alone. You have a very powerful co-teacher." And it's the child's inner teacher. It's the child's drives. And that's what we have to partner with, right? And that's what we have to not be an obstacle to. If we get out of the way and we allow that co-teacher, that child's inner teacher to do most of the work, then we can just facilitate the environment and we can just be there to offer that scaffolding. And we can be there to be a sounding board. But sometimes our ego thinks that we are the most important ones and we forget that we are just a partner in this whole, this whole rollercoaster ride of raising children. I think there's a level of that that we also have to embrace the reality that there will be times that we screw this up. Absolutely. And there's a modeling in that that happens. You know, like there are going to be times where you do offer useless help. Or, you know, you're just wanting to rush things around long in this child is taking forever to put on their socks. Or they aren't putting on the socks the way you want them to put on the socks, right? So anyways, you have to embrace your own humanity. I think also that you are going to make mistakes as a parent and you're going to model both making amends like apologizing and model growth. And that again, just like allowing the child to have failures, you are showing them to that failures is not a stop sign. It is a bump that we get over, right? And so I think there are failures are just as important for the children to experience as it is their own. Oh, absolutely. We can't grow if we don't make mistakes. And this whole wanting to prevent children from feeling the difficult feelings that come from experiencing disappointment or regret or failure, right? We also often don't want to experience those very uncomfortable feelings, but it is only through feeling those feelings, through sitting with those very difficult uncomfortable emotions. It is only there that we learn so that we don't keep recreating those situations that lead to those difficult feelings, right? We don't want to avoid the discomfort that comes with realizing that we are wrong or that we have to apologize or that we were an obstacle to the child's development. We want to sit with those difficult feelings, sit in prayer, sit in meditation, sit in journaling, right? And work through those feelings because that is the only way that the human brain learns. And this is, I'm not like this doesn't come from me. This is research back and it's truly a testament that every mistake that we make is a true learning experience if we can sit with it. And it is very tricky. I totally get that. But that's the spiritual preparation of the adult that Dr. Montessori spoke about. She actually said nothing is more quoting from the discovery of the child. She said nothing is more difficult for a teacher than to give up her old habits and prejudices. And when she writes, if she says nothing is more difficult, like she has thought this through. She has gone through a list of everything that is difficult for an adult and she has thought this through. So nothing is more difficult for a teacher than to give up her old habits and prejudices. So I understand it is a very difficult process. Yeah, it is. It's that growth mentality. I think another aspect of all of this that has to be embraced is an understanding of who the child is that's in front of you. For example, if we have too high or too low of expectations for this specific age of a child in front of me, we also I think are being that hindrance and development as well. Absolutely. So what's really interesting about Montessori versus conventional education is that in conventional education, for example, in a preschool setting, the children are normally placed in groups. And so there's a lot of emphasis on social development, right? Playing with your friends and working with your friends. Even though developmentally, we know from a Montessori perspective that children are developing the ability to concentrate and they do more work in parallel. And so that's what would be developmentally more appropriate. And then in elementary, it switches. In conventional education, children are placed in desks and they're all looking forward at the teacher when the reality is that developmentally a more social environment, whether it's in a classroom with a group of children or at home with siblings, parents, co-ops, etc. That's how the elementary child thrives. And so going into the Montessori theory and understanding how the sensitive periods manifest at each stage of development and how the human tendencies have, like the drive to work, the drive to explore the drive to work towards mastery, how all of those manifest make it so much easier to work with children and make it so much easier to not be an obstacle. Because if you're creating the conditions that support the child's development, then you're allowing that inner teacher to do its job. It's a really understanding the children in general and then understanding your own child or the child that is before you that you're working with. For example, I have two children and they are polar opposites of each other. When I forget that and I approach one child in the way that usually works for the other child, oh, I am handed a huge lesson in how not to approach this child or how not to try to support this child because they are not afraid to let me know because there's trust too, right? Once the children trust us, they will let us know when we are being an obstacle to their development. So that trust piece comes back and is really important. Yes, knowing your children, knowing their plane of development and what those characteristics look like and then how to prepare an environment and how to guide lessons and conversations in ways that the child is going to naturally be attracted to makes it so much easier for things to flow. Yeah, yeah, I agree. And I think part of that trust that you were just speaking into also includes trusting your response when as they are trying something on their own and they fail or they make mistakes in your response. Would you be able to speak into maybe what we as adults should pay attention to in our response when we encounter, you know, those moments where the child and our eyes have failed or they've made a mistake or they fall or whatever. What should we look in ourselves for that? Oh, yes. This is the, I think one of the trickiest parts because we all have micro expressions, right? So facial expressions that flash on and off, but our children are biologically attuned to read our micro expressions because that is how they stay safe, right? So it is very tricky to regulate our micro expressions if our emotions and our stories are not aligned with what we want to project. And so the more work that we can do on ourselves to realize like it's okay to make mistakes, not only is it okay, it's the only way to learn and to laugh at yourself when things go wrong. Like this morning I made myself coffee but I didn't heat the water. I used a French press. I didn't heat the water and I poured cold water into my French press, took it upstairs happily, poured myself a freezing cold cup of coffee and I laughed when I tasted it. And then it took me a moment to realize like the old me prior to doing this work would have been furious, would have like engaged in negative self-talk, would have thought that the entire day was ruined, would have been just so frustrated at the inconvenience of having to go downstairs and start over. But once you're doing this work, then you just start laughing at these situations. And when you can laugh internally or when you can grant yourself grace internally, then you're able to project to the child that you truly believe that mistakes are the only way to learn and you truly believe that you trust the child. But in order for us to project it externally, it has to first manifest internally and in order for that to happen, we have to do our internal work. And so if you're practicing doing that, it is totally okay to have that micro expression flash in your face or to even get truly angry, truly frustrated and then recovering. Right? Saying like, oh, yeah, I have to be honest. I was scared when that glass hit the floor. That was a really loud noise and my nervous system was very, very, like it was in shock. But let's look at it together. Huh, what happened? The glass broke. Okay, you know, we're just going to be objective. What glass broke? What a bummer. What can we do to fix this? How can we focus on a solution instead of creating a judgment? So, those kinds of processes, as you walk through them and as you verbalize them for your child, your child is also learning to give themselves grace, just like you are showing them that you can go from through a process of feeling a big feeling and then processing it to the point where you're no longer reactive. A wonderful exercise to do with children is to talk about the brain and the palm of the hand. And this is something that was developed by Dr. Seagull and you can look them up on YouTube. And he has a video, again, you can look it up, it's called the brain and the palm of your hand and it shows how your hand is a model of the different parts of the human brain. So you can talk to the child about which part of the brain, as represented by the hand, does what? And so our prefrontal cortex, which is the part of us that helps us stay calm, regulated, I solve problems, be reasonable, all of those things that we want to portray to the child. The prefrontal cortex is our fingers that overlap a fist where the thumb is folded into the palm and then we overlap the four fingers. But when our brain goes into fight or flight, when our brain thinks that it's in danger, we flip our lid. Our prefrontal cortex goes offline. Our four fingers flip up. And so that sign is kind of like holding a number four with your thumb pressed against your palm. That sign, when you chat with the child about it, shows the child that when you're in that flip lid mode, your brain is not thinking clearly. And so when this becomes part of your vocabulary as a family or as a classroom and the glass breaks and you yell because you went into reactive mode, you can recover by telling your child, you know what? I was in flip lid mode and you can show your hand and say, I was in flip lid mode and so that's why I yelled. And then I took some deep breaths and my prefrontal cortex came back online. My four fingers, you can show the four fingers rolling back down to cover the thumb. And then that's when we realized that it wasn't the end of the world. It was a broken glass. We can clean it up. And we've learned from the experience what can we do differently next time. Right? So it's not about being perfect. It's about being in touch with ourselves, developing a series of tools and then modeling to the children that we are all human. And we're all just doing the best we can. Yeah. I like that because I think sometimes, you know, it becomes like a snowball effect. You have this big reaction. Then you feel guilty for your big reaction or your big response that you had to a situation and it just kind of spirals out of control. But this gives you permission to have the big feelings, like again, just the same with the kids. Like they're going to get upset, frustrated, angry, all of these things giving ourselves the same permission that we also are allowed to have these big emotions. It's not okay to hit. It's not okay to scream it somewhere. You know, like those same limits apply to us as adults too. But that doesn't mean we're not allowed to have a big feeling. That's exactly right. Genuine with the children, right? Because otherwise they're not going to trust us. If we're always pretending that we are perfect and that we don't have emotions and that we don't ever get reactive, they're not going to trust us because children know that we're not being genuine. Or on some level, they are going to feel like there's something wrong with them for having big emotions, right? Other than, you know, this is just part of a human, this is just part of being human. The other part of what you were saying in regards to being aware of our reactions, you know, if a child's making a mistake or whatever, it's also our anticipation of a reaction. The thought right now I have a story from a friend's toddler atrium. She was talking about how for the monastery bridge is in their atrium and the child would start walking up the atrium and then turn to look at their mother and the mother would have this like scared look on her face and so the child would go back down. And the the catacidist observed this many times and eventually asked the mom, I want you to look away whenever the child starts going up the bridge and that worked. The child looked, the mom wasn't looking so if they finished going up the bridge. So it's a good example though of our anticipation of a, I don't want to say failure, but you know, a mistake, them not doing something the way we would want them falling, them getting hurt. Our anticipation of that can also be a hindrance to the child's development. Absolutely. I've always wondered if Dr. Montessori encouraged teachers to observe children sitting down, you know, with a notebook out of the way in a corner, not just for the adult to learn observation and to learn about the children, but also to get out of the way and to not be reactive. Right? Especially in a toddler classroom or a 3-6 classroom, it can be a very reactive environment because there are a lot of mistakes going on. There's a lot of things that are dropping. There are a lot of beads rolling everywhere. Right. And so when we force ourselves to sit in a chair and hold onto a notebook and just keep writing no matter what, unless obviously a child is damaging a material or hurting somebody else or hurting themselves. But if none of that is happening and it's just beads rolling around or, you know, bolst lighting off a tray, we have to stay seated. And by staying seated and not being reactive, we are able to see the entire arc of what happens from the time the bolst slips off the tray when it hits the ground, how the child reacts, what the child does next, all of those things that would not have happened if we had stepped in and said, "Oh no, no, that's not how you carry the tray here, write it up or you're not ready for that material. Let's put it away." Right? So holding ourselves back can be so educational to ourselves and so beneficial for the children's development. Yeah. I agree. Would you speak into attachment and how it has a role to play in all of this that we've been talking about? Attachment is the relationship that the child and the adult have, where the child looks at the adult as a mentor, a guiding compass, an elder, somebody from whom to take cues. Right? When there's a healthy, what's called, adult attachment. When we step to either side of that balance of supporting healthy independence, we can damage that attachment. So if we do too much for the child, then the child doesn't see us as a guide, they see us as a hindrance. Right? Then we don't support the child too enough when we don't offer that scaffolding, then the child experiences a rupture in the attachment and they have to turn to somebody else to look for guidance. And oftentimes the child will turn to their peers because that is who is available and that's not so terrible when they're three years old. But as they move into elementary and adolescence, children who are peer-oriented, who are attached to their peers, are looking for guidance from individuals who are not ready to give guidance. And so finding that middle ground, that sitting in that zone of proximal development, where you can offer scaffolding, where you can support independence by creating dependence when the child needs it. Right? By allowing the child to depend on you when they need it, you're actually supporting their independence in a healthy way. So just like we don't want to be an obstacle to the child's development and to the child's independence, like we don't want to get in the way we don't want to stop it, we also don't want to rush that independence. And that is a huge misconception that I see in Montessori, where it's like Dr Montessori says, "Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed." Right? But that's a task at which the child feels they can succeed. You might think that the child can succeed because again, that's what your teacher told you or a book you read or a social media. But if you push a child towards independence before they're ready, be it a toilet learning or getting dressed on their own or writing or reading or anything like that, then you can be as much of an obstacle to their development as if you had done the complete opposite and stop them when they were ready. So we're always walking that fine line and focusing on the relationship on keeping that attachment healthy. I hear that pendulum again. You can go, "If you're not careful, you can swing one way or the other." So I feel like observation is the key there to make sure that you can stay on that fine line. Absolutely. And we're always going to be swinging back and forth a little bit, right? But the trick, I guess, or the focus should be on, yes, observing where we are on that pendulum and then just correcting, taking corrective actions all the time, giving ourselves grace and understanding that this is a lifelong process. And even as our children reach adulthood, I'm sure that you can attest having older children, right? And sometimes offer useless help and sometimes you won't step in where your child may be wished that you had offered more support. So it's always a learning journey, but the more we can be aware that all of this is taking place and the more tools that we can develop, the better we are going to be in terms of offering useful help to the child. Well, I think that there's a lot to think about. Everything that we have talked about today, I feel like we've covered or not even covered. We've just tapped on a lot of subjects that, man, I feel like I can really sit and ponder deeper. I am so grateful to you, Plur, I'm so grateful for your wisdom and for you sitting and sharing it with us today. Oh, thank you for giving me this opportunity. It's such an important topic because it spans the entirety of a child's development and into adulthood. So it's been such a pleasure to be able to share what I've learned and some of the tools that parents can use and educators can use. Yeah, I agree. It's very, very important. Plur, do you like to share with us where people can find you? Absolutely. Thank you. So the best places to find me are either through my website, mainly Montessori.com, or on social media, on Instagram, at mainly.montessori.homeschool. And I do focus a lot on homeschool, but I love talking Montessori with all sorts. Whoever wants to embrace it in whatever format is appropriate for their life, always happy to chat. So please reach out and connect. Well, thank you. Thank you so much, Plur. Thank you, Carrie. Thanks for having me on. Thank you, off-ro listening, to this week's episode of The Good Shepherd in the Child Podcast. In our show notes, you will find information about Polar and how you can follow her on social media, as well as links to other episodes about freedom and discipline, freedom and responsibility that can age you on this journey. Don't forget that you can access the audio version of the religious potential of the child on Audible now. We also encourage you to look at becoming a CGS USA member. So check out our show notes for a link on all the benefits of being a member is what supports the podcast and all the work that CGS USA does. So please, perfectly consider joining our community. This podcast is sponsored by the United States Association of the Cateches of The Good Shepherd. We would like to thank all the contributing members because you are making this podcast possible. You would like to know more about CGS or if you would like to become a member, please go to CGSUSA.org. Thank you all for listening. We will see you in two weeks. Go and fall more deeply in love with God.