Want to Reduce Your Child’s Stress? Give Their Environment a Sense of Order
Why do children seem to obsess over things being out of place? Because they’re trying to find peace within themselves. When things are disordered, the child becomes stressed because developmentally they cannot yet cope with unexpected change. But when a child knows what to expect in their environment, they feel a sense comfort.
Adults must honor that sense of order and provide a consistent, ordered environment and routine that can ease the child’s stress and help them feel peaceful.
Why Order Is Developmentally Important
Our children spend the first years of life making sense of the world they experience. Through their environment they learn language and classification. They learn patterns and consistency. They feel pride in knowing what is coming their way.
That’s why having order in their space is important: When the child clearly knows what to expect, when to expect it and where to expect it, they will develop a sense of order in their mind.
Sensitive Period for Order
Dr. Maria Montessori observed that around age 2 is when a child’s internal sense of order becomes the most outwardly obvious.
We watch the 2-year-old stress about order in their space. They stop what they are doing to return an object to its rightful place. They become agitated when you sit in a different seat at the dinner table.
This sensitivity to order can manifest itself in ways we clearly see, in activities and behaviors like:
Lining objects in a row
Organizing objects from smallest to largest
Pairing like items
Expecting adults’ behaviors to be the same
Needing the same order of routine each day
Our Reaction May Not Be What They Need
When we watch our children become agitated or even have a tantrum of emotion at the sight of something being out of order, we experience a few things.
First, we feel that it must be fixed to alleviate the stress the child is experiencing. Second, we worry about this need to control something that seems so small. We think this is not a behavior that will benefit the child as they age, and we feel we must help them see that they cannot always have everything just the way they want it.
Sense of Order Must Be Honored
The truth is that this insistence on order is developmentally necessary. So we as adults must provide order in our environments and set expectations that this order be maintained.
Your child will become more at ease as they enter their third year and this “obsession” will not linger so long as we provide a sense of order in our homes and routines.
Ways to promote order in your home while setting limits:
Everything has a place and is returned to its place when not in use.
The day has a consistent routine that is followed daily.
Limits are set on expectations of daily activities and enforced consistently:
We sit to eat.
We sleep on our bed.
We use soft voices inside.
We are gentle with the pets.
We can’t always keep things the same for our young children. As we experience unforeseen changes in our schedules, our children will find comfort when we keep things as consistent as possible. For example, you can establish a getting-ready-to-go-out-of-the-house routine that remains consistent even if the activity you are going out to do is different day to day.
Order Is Happiness
When our space is organized in a predictable manner our children can find a sense of peace. Dr. Montessori observed that when a child’s need for order is satisfied, true happiness can be found.
“The proper environment of the soul is one in which an individual can move about with eyes closed and find, simply by reaching out his hand, anything he desires. Such an environment is necessary for peace and happiness.”
-Dr. Maria Montessori, The Secret of Childhood