Parents have been sold a false definition of learning. The still, compliant child absorbing information passively is not the child who is learning most effectively, it is the child who has learned to perform the appearance of learning. The child wiggling, touching objects, pressing a teacher with questions, staying in a struggle longer than feels comfortable: that is where learning actually lives.
Shannon Penrose, associated with Growing Brilliant, has spent her career at the intersection of early childhood development and the science of what actually predicts a child’s trajectory in life. “Parents have been sold a false definition of learning,” Penrose states. “Compliance is being confused with genuine learning, and that confusion is costing children the skills they need most.”
The Most Important Developmental Pillar Nobody Is Building
Of the three pillars Penrose identifies in child development – mind, heart, and will – it is will, or executive function, that is most dangerously neglected in current education. Executive function encompasses the ability to direct attention, manage impulse, and persist through difficulty. It is a stronger predictor of life outcomes than IQ, stronger than early literacy, and it is almost entirely absent from how most young children are educated.
Schools do well teaching ABCs and 123s. What they fail to build is metacognition, the ability to think about one’s own thinking. A child who can name frustration, recognize that struggle is information rather than failure, and stay with something hard because they want to understand it has a developmental advantage that no test score captures. “The ability to direct your own attention towards something that matters, even when it’s very difficult, is a higher predictor of success than IQ,” Penrose reflects. The challenge is that executive function does not look like what parents were trained to recognize as learning, which is precisely why it keeps being overlooked.
Eight Million Children With No Access to the Training That Matters Most
The access gap is stark. More than half of America’s preschool-age children between two and six are not in preschool at all. 4.4 million children ages three to four sit entirely outside the educational system, in child care deserts, rural communities, low-income neighborhoods where supply simply does not exist.
Private preschool alternatives in major cities run between $8,000 and $10,000 annually. Wait lists for transitional kindergarten programs in cities like Manhattan stretch two years. Approximately 350,000 children with medical complexity or immunocompromised conditions cannot attend traditional preschool at all.
The consequence is not merely missed academic content. It is missed development of the exact capabilities, focus, self-regulation, productive struggle, that will determine how these children navigate everything that follows. “These kids don’t have school failing them,” Penrose observes. “They just don’t have school at all.” That distinction matters because the solution it points toward is different from school reform. It points toward access, to structured environments where a trained adult can name what is happening inside a child’s mind and guide them through the experience of staying with something hard.
What It Looks Like When This Is Actually Taught
At Growing Brilliant, focus and self-control are not byproducts of the curriculum. They are the architecture of it. The program is built around a 45-minute lesson structure, what Penrose calls the Goldilocks window for a young child’s sustained attention, within which every transition is explicitly taught, every frustration is named, and teachers scaffold learning the moment a child reaches the edge of their capacity. Children touch objects, move around, ask questions. These are not distractions from learning. They are the learning.
The model demonstrates that executive function is a trainable skill, not an innate trait. The children who appear to lack focus or self-control are not missing a capacity, they are missing the deliberate instruction that builds one. “When lessons are structured to embed regulation and productive struggle from the ground up,” Penrose asserts, “children are able to develop the capacity to direct their own attention.” Parents who understand how to support it become multipliers, reaching not just their own children but shaping how those children approach every learning environment they will enter.
Follow Shannon Penrose on LinkedIn or visit Growing Brilliant for more insights on early childhood development, executive function, and building the learning capabilities that determine long-term outcomes.
