Begin With Yourself - Why Every Kid Needs to Climb

And what sensory processing taught me about teaching my own classroom

I have ADHD. I didn't get real language for what that meant until I became a teacher myself.

What changed things wasn't a diagnosis, mine or anyone else's. It was watching my own classroom. I started building in small accommodations for the handful of students with documented sensory processing needs — timers, visual reminders, nonverbal cues, regular time outside built into the day instead of treated as a reward.

Scott - Founder of Wildward Institute - Leading students in Cuyamaca Rancho State Park

Here's what I didn't expect. Those same accommodations made every student in the room more successful. Not just the kids who needed them. Everyone.

I carried that lesson with me — training interpreters at California State Parks on engaging neurodivergent youth, then again at the aquarium, working with kids on and off the spectrum. It kept repeating. Design for the kid who needs the most support, and you usually build something better for everyone in the room.

Emily Wishnick discovered the same thing, from the opposite side of the desk.

Emily is an occupational therapist who has spent over a decade visiting classrooms across the Philadelphia region — sometimes twenty schools a month. That volume gave her something most educators never get: pattern recognition across an entire system, not just one classroom.

Emily Wishnick -- Occupational Therapist

The pattern wasn't encouraging. Developmentally inappropriate expectations, pushed-down academics, kids with real sensory processing needs given the exact same task as everyone else, with no accommodation and no support. "If you're somebody who cares, and you see this problem over and over again and you can't do anything about it," she told me, "it feels like you're working against gravity."

She burned out. Then a teacher mentioned, offhand, that a professional development workshop on autism she'd just sat through was bad. Genuinely unhelpful.

"I could do that in my sleep," Emily remembers thinking. That was the moment everything she'd been quietly cataloging for years turned into a framework instead of a private frustration.

The framework is called the Hundred Languages of Regulation, and its foundation is something most teacher training programs never cover: sensory processing.

Emily Wishnick doing wheel barrles with an OT students

"Sensory processing is human," Emily told me. Every person is constantly filtering sensory input — sound, touch, temperature, movement — and most of us do it so automatically we never notice. For some kids, that filter works differently. A task that looks like simple noncompliance is often a nervous system that's overwhelmed and has no other way to communicate it.

The fix, in Emily's experience, is rarely more direct instruction. It's usually better environmental design. Climbing equipment. Open-ended materials. Time and space built into the day for kids to move their bodies the way their bodies are developmentally built to move.

"Climbing is a heavy hitter," she told me. It activates the body's sense of where it is in space — what occupational therapists call the proprioceptive sense — which, in turn, supports everything from fine motor skills to emotional regulation. "If you're feeling all over the place, climbing can be the thing that brings you down," she said. Literally grounding, in the most physical sense of the word.

One story stuck with me more than any other.

Emily visits schools where a child who doesn't nap during nap time has nowhere else to go and nothing else productive to do, so they're handed a screen and told to stay quiet on a mat for over an hour. She doesn't blame the teachers — they're doing the best they can with no other option, no extra staff, no separate space. But developmentally, she's clear: it's the wrong tool for the problem, applied because the right tool was never funded.

There's research that backs up something both of us learned independently, from very different

Students and teachers exploring a waterfall at Green Valley Falls in San Diego Couty

fields. A 1994 study in the Journal of Environmental Education found that students without regular access to natural, wild spaces showed measurably more fear and discomfort when they finally encountered them (Bixler, Carlisle & Hammitt, 1994). Not because the outdoors is inherently frightening — because unfamiliarity itself creates that response. Repeated, regular access is what builds comfort. The same principle Emily applies inside a classroom applies to an entire generation's relationship with the natural world.

I asked Emily what she'd tell listeners to do as soon as they finished this conversation. Her answer had nothing to do with classrooms or playgrounds.

Emily working with a smiling student outside.

"Understanding that your own emotional regulation impacts every single person you meet," she said. "Our brains are communicating with each other at all times. If you want to see more peace in this world, begin with yourself."

If we want to care for and protect the places where we play, it turns out the place to start might be considerably closer to home.

Listen to this week's episode of Hopeful by Nature wherever you get your podcasts.

— Scott

Wildward Institute supports organizations, educators, and parents building meaningful relationships between young people and the outdoors. Learn more at wildwardinstitute.net.

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