At The SHF, we recognise that children and young people are social by nature, that they thrive on good nutrition and contact with both their peers and adults. These interactions and influences help facilitate the learning that helps them build healthy bodies and minds, as well as purposeful lives.
Rather than subduing young children’s active and unique powers of imagination and creativity, their learning is best enhanced through play – not desk based classrooms empty of soft furnishings, toys, or other materials. We can also dramatically enhance health span by both optimising the expression of genes and establishing healthy behaviours from an early age, including around food. Healthy children help forge healthy communities and healthy societies.
A child’s nervous system ‘reads and responds’ to his or her environment and particularly that of adults, and they are particularly sensitive to anxiety, fear and stress. They need to move often and require a level of structure and boundaries. Their immune system relies on dirt and everyday germs – it literally ‘primes’ itself, which is why we love the ethos and approach of The New School.
