Parenting to Nurture the Brain at Orion Montessori

I had such a wonderful time with the parent and school community at Orion Montessori last week. We met for 90 minutes to look at how the way we parent can nurture strong brain development from infancy through adolescence. 

I met Shriee Srinivas, Orion's founder and CEO, back in 2018 when she was a student in the Neuroscience of Learning course at Harvard. I was a Teaching Assistant on the course and remember how Shriee helped the other students overcome an obstacle they were facing with accessing documents from the Harvard library. She was a course hero! I was tickled when she invited me to speak at her school.

During the talk, we focused on some key topics that are pretty universal for parents with children of all ages. We started with a preview of some of the ideas I'm hoping to share in my upcoming TEDx talk (more posts on that coming soon). The big idea there is that interest drives learning and can help us overcome learning obstacles we may face. When we're interested in something, we persevere and dive deep. That gives the brain the practice it needs to develop stronger networks. Those stronger networks make it easier for us to do things because they make the brain more efficient.

We also took a look at executive functions and how we support their development by offering children freedom with limits. Of course that led us to look at the role of relationships, emotions, and the stress response in learning.

From here, we got into more specifics about what you can expect developmentally from different ages. We offered tips and tricks and activities that can be helpful, including some suggestions for managing screen time and sleep. 

I hope you enjoy watching the video and thank you to Orion for recording and their willingness to share. It was a really fun night with some great questions and insight from the parent community. Thank you to everyone at Orion Montessori for hosting and making it such a worthwhile night!