HeyJaredThe Inputs Children Need
Modern children are not broken. They are missing the play, movement, independence, risk, responsibility, and real-world practice childhood used to provide. I’m a public school teacher helping adults restore the developmental inputs children need.
- Indexed issues, last 90 days
- 9
- Latest publication
- Aug 24, 2026
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- Earliest in this view
- Jul 9, 2026
Latest issues
We Keep Telling Kids to Go Outside and Play. Then We Give Them Nowhere Worth Going To. (opens the original)
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The hardest part of getting children off screens is not convincing them to go outside. It is giving them an outside world worth entering. We tell parents to open the door after spending decades dismantling what once waited there: reachable friends, unclaimed time, safe routes, open schoolyards, and public places children could enter without registering first.Imagine a parent taking the standard advice. She turns off her nine-year-old’s tablet and sends him outside. He rides around on his scooter
We Keep Trying to Save Instructional Time. We’re Accidentally Gutting It Instead. (opens the original)
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Here is a very normal scene in a modern elementary classroom.A strenuous 75-minute math block ends. Some students leave the classroom for intervention. Another group gathers with the teacher for small-group intervention. Everyone else is supposed to begin working independently.The directions are familiar. The materials are ready. The children know what to do.Then someone cannot find a page. Someone else turns around to talk. A child gets out of their seat. Another appears to need the bathroom wi
Who Gets the Reps? (opens the original)
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Early in my teaching career, I watched a 5th grade girl crawl under a desk and cry over a piece of construction paper. At least, that’s what I thought had happened.My students were working in small groups on a project. The classroom sounded exactly like an elementary classroom should. Scissors snipped through construction paper. Glue sticks rolled across desks. Someone was laughing about something that had nothing to do with the assignment. Another group was negotiating whose turn it was to use
We Gave Children Destinations to Visit. They Need a World to Inhabit. (opens the original)
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When I returned to my hometown in West Michigan recently, I remembered roads I had not driven in years, houses whose families have faded in my memory, and hills and woods I rode my bike through that looked smaller than they had any right to look.But what came back most clearly were the shortcuts.There was the opening behind one row of houses, the secret trail that came out near a friend’s backyard, the tiny path through the woods that led to the Lutheran church parking lot, the trail that seemed
Stop Doing What Works. Start Doing What Helps. (opens the original)
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The boy became perfect the moment the iPad lit up.He had been squirming in the restaurant booth, talking too much, looking around, asking when the food was coming, struggling in the very ordinary way children struggle when they are hungry, tired, bored, and expected to act like miniature monks in a vinyl booth for twenty minutes. Then the dad across from him handed him a screen.Silence. Stillness. Peace. It worked.That phrase has been stuck in my head lately.It worked.But did it help?If the goal
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