"As long as the child is engaged in something safe and purposeful (requiring effort of the mind and body working together), this is considered work. The adult's role is to respect and protect this concentration, just as we did his sleeping and eating schedule and movement development in the first year:

The first essential for the child's development is concentration. It lays the whole basis for his character and social behaviour. Praise, help, or even a look, may be enough to interrupt him, or destroy the activity. It seems a strange thing to say, but this can happen even if the child merely becomes aware of being watched. After all, we too sometimes feel unable to go on working if someone comes to see what we are doing.

The teacher's (and parent's) skill in not interfering comes with practice, like everything else, but it never comes very easily. What advice can we give to mothers? Their children need to work at an interesting occupation: they should not be helped unnecessarily, nor interrupted, once they have begun to do something intelligent."

The Absorbent Mind - Dr. Maria Montessori

“...but I know happiness does not come with things. It can come from work and pride in what you do.”

M. Gandhi

"The movements the child acquires are not chosen haphazardly, but are fixed, in the sense that each proceeds out of a particular period of development ...If you watch a child you will see that he is always playing with something. This means that he is working out, and making conscious, something that his unconscious mind has earlier absorbed. Through this outward experience, in the guise of a game, he examines those things and impressions that he has taken in unconsciously...He is directed by a mysterious power, great and wonderful, that he incarnates little by little. In this way, he becomes a man. He does this with his hands, by experience, first in play and then through work. The hands are the instruments of man's intelligence."

The Absorbent Mind - Dr. Maria Montessori

© 1996 The Montessori Foundation