What are the capacities of children of different ages? How can they be recognized? And critically, what kinds of environments nourish optimal development of each capacity? These are questions that every parent, teacher, and child-oriented professional yearns to answer. They wish to recognize the child’s capabilities and respond to them to ensure optimal well-being. Is this possible? Yes! When we ask the right questions, the door opens. But do the answers require complex academic training to understand? Does their implementation require professional skills? No! Remarkably, the door opens to an intuitively satisfying appreciation of children that requires no extensive training to understand and act upon it. This appreciation - this world that lies beyond the open door - is described by Natural Learning Relationships (NLR). Succinctly stated, NLR maps the unfolding of the innate capacities in children and offers guidelines to creating relationships that lead to optimal well-being.
Natural Learning Relationships offers profound insight into each developmental stage. For instance:

• Creating environments that support (or poison) well-being in the child
• Clear, simple descriptions of the unique qualities, nature, phases, and characteristics
• An in-depth appreciation of how a child moves from one developmental stage to another is often the most difficult for parents and teachers
• The importance of the language of each stage the key to successful communication
• The development of meaning within each stage
• Shifts in the perceptions of time and space and the implications for intellectual, social, emotional, and spiritual learning.
• Identification of developmental malnourishment and of remedies that restore well-being in the child and family

Approaching child development from the perspectives of well-being rather than pathology or cultural standards of normalcy yields many surprises. For instance:

• Development occurs in the matrix of relationships, not in the individual child
• Many behaviors viewed as pathological are natural expressions of health, especially during critical transition years around 8, 13, and 17
• A child’s personality is not solely determined in the early years of life but forms and re-forms throughout their childhood
• Children seek boundaries and thrive when boundaries are created with sensitivity
• Gender and racial prejudice do not arise in developmentally nourished children
• Nonsectarian spirituality is implicit in each stage
• Teens yearn for guidance from trusted family members
• Developmental nourishment remedy’s most childhood dysfunction (and without professional interventions)
• Primary learning of the importance of community and environment occurs between the ages of 8 and 12

Amazingly, almost every family can nourish the well-being of a child. This means that Natural Learning Relationships has value for parents, teachers, education administrators, counselors, therapists, and grandparents, as evidenced in the many experiential learning programs that we have facilitated for whole families, children, schools, and social service agencies. In the vast majority of participants, socioeconomic status or ethnic/religious background does not inhibit learning.

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