A child stands at the edge of a puddle. Wellies on, hood up, the usual. She looks at the water, then up at the adult beside her. Not for permission, exactly. Something more like a weather report. Is this a place where I can be myself today? Are you watching for danger, or are you watching for me?
She finds her answer in a fraction of a second, and steps in.
After twenty years of working with young children, I have come to believe that almost everything we worry about as parents and practitioners, the milestones, the screens, the fussy eating, the friendships, sits downstream of something much simpler. Children are not asking us for more. They are asking us for a small, specific set of conditions that allow them to grow.
In the Growing Curious Children framework, I call these the Five Builders: Safety. Warmth. Freedom. Words. Wonder.
Five things. None of them cost anything. All of them are unfashionable, in their way, because none of them can be bought, packaged, or posted on a grid. They are also, in my experience, the hardest things to protect, precisely because they look so ordinary that we forget they are doing the work.
Safety
Safety is the floor. Without it, nothing else can be built.
I do not mean the kind of safety that wraps a child in foam. I mean the deeper kind: the felt sense that the adult nearby is paying attention, that the world is broadly predictable, that big feelings will not break the relationship. Children who feel safe will climb higher than children who do not. They will try things, fall, cry, and come back. Safety is what makes risk possible, not what removes it.
You can see it in a child’s shoulders. A safe child carries them low.
Warmth
Warmth is harder to describe than safety, but children find it instantly. It is the quality of being met. The way an adult’s face changes when a child walks into the room. The lap that opens without anyone asking. The small, unhurried noises of being interested in someone: mm, oh, did it?
Warmth is not the same as constant praise, and it is not the same as being entertained. It is steadier than that. It says: I like you. I am glad you are here. There is nothing you need to do to keep me.
Children who are warmed in this way do not become clingy. They become brave. They have somewhere to come back to.
Freedom
By freedom, I do not mean a child running the household. I mean the freedom that lives inside good boundaries: the space to choose, to potter, to follow a thread for as long as it interests them, to be bored without rescue.
So much of modern early childhood is scheduled. There is a class for everything, a club for everything, a screen for the gaps. We have, with the best of intentions, filled in the very spaces where children used to do their most important work.
A child who is given the freedom to dig, to dawdle, to change their mind, to do nothing, is a child who learns that their own attention is interesting and worth following. That is the seed of every later capacity for focus, for creativity, for self-direction.
Words
Words are how we hand children the world.
Not flashcards. Not apps. The ordinary, generous river of language that runs through a day when an adult is genuinely talking with a child rather than at them. The naming of small things. The musing aloud. The stories told in the car. The questions answered properly, even when the answer is “I don’t know, what do you think?”
My doctoral research has taken me deep into the relationship between adult-child ratios and language development, and the picture that emerges is consistent: children flourish linguistically when there is enough of an attentive adult to go round. The quantity of words matters. So does quality. So does turn-taking: the back-and-forth that says your voice belongs in this conversation.
A child who has been spoken to, listened to, and read with does not need to be taught to love language. They already do.
Wonder
Wonder is the one we most often forget, because it looks like nothing is happening.
A child crouched over a beetle. A child watching rain slide down a window. A child holding a stick as though it is a very serious object. Which, to her, it is.
Wonder is the disposition that says the world is worth paying attention to. It is the root of curiosity, of science, of art, of faith, of every later form of meaningful engagement. And it is fragile. It does not survive constant interruption, redirection, or improvement. It needs adults who can stand still beside it and not fill the silence.
Protecting wonder, I think, is the most counter-cultural thing a parent can do in 2026.
The quiet argument
What I want to say, gently, is this: the things children need from us are not new, and they are not for sale. The Five Builders have been there all along, in every culture that has ever raised a child well. They sit underneath the latest advice, the latest products, the latest panics.
This is why the enrichment industry makes me a little weary. Not because enrichment is wrong, children do of course benefit from beautiful materials and interesting experiences, but because it can quietly suggest that without those things, our children are missing out. They are not. A child who has safety, warmth, freedom, words, and wonder has, in the deepest sense, enough.
If you have read the Less is More piece, you will find the same argument here from a different angle. Less stuff. Less scheduling. More of the simple, unbuyable things that actually grow children.
The puddle is still there. The child is still looking up. What she needs from us is not complicated. She needs us to be the kind of adults who know the answer to her question. And the answer, almost always, is yes, this is a place where you can be yourself today.
Susanne Rice
Registered Childminder · MEd, MRes · EdD Researcher
Founder, Grounded Parenting & Growing Curious Children