How Childhood Development Through Embodied Cognition Can Help Schools Better Support Learning and Emotional Growth

As neuroscience and developmental research seem to continue to advance, educators and health professionals appear to be revisiting long-held assumptions about how children learn. Athena Oden, pediatric physical therapist and founder of Ready Bodies, Learning Minds LLC, believes one area deserves particular attention: the relationship between movement, sensory experience, and cognitive and behavioral development.

Oden has spent years assisting students, teachers, schools, and families to better understand how children’s physical development, sensory processing, and movement influence learning and classroom participation. Drawing on decades of clinical experience, Oden says her work has increasingly focused on helping people recognize that development is shaped by far more than academic instruction and behavioral control. 

“A body is not what a person possesses; it is who that person is,” Oden says. "A child develops as a whole person, through movement, touch, balance, effort, failure, relationship, stress, and experience."

Her perspective reflects a wider research conversation. A study shows that research on embodied cognition recognizes cognitive processing as tightly coupled with bodily activities and the environment, and notes that learning and behavioral development can be enhanced when the brain, body, and environment influence one another. For Oden, that finding matters because many school routines still treat movement as a break from learning rather than as part of how learning becomes integrated.

Oden traces part of the issue to the lasting influence of an early developmental theory. She explains that Jean Piaget’s cognitive theory work has helped shape education by organizing childhood development into stages, with the sensory motor stage completed in the first few years of life. In her view, that framework emerged during a period when many children entered formal school after years of outdoor, unstructured, physical experience. Today, she says, children often arrive with fewer opportunities, while classroom expectations continue with seated instruction, handwriting for very young children, and even higher academic demands. 

According to Oden, maturity is also widely misunderstood. She explains that in embodied cognition, maturity is often defined as a developmental organization built through years of repeated sensory, motor, social, and emotional experiences. Research shows that the brain finishes developing and maturing in the mid to late 20s. Oden believes that context should influence how adults discuss attention, focus, and emotional regulation in children. 

“I believe regulation is not a state of mind or a thing to be taught,” Oden says. “Self-regulation and emotional regulation grow through development, through co-regulation with mature adults, and through environments that give the nervous system enough real experience to mature and organize itself.”

That view also shapes how she interprets the current debate over screens in schools. In March 2026, it was reported that 114 education systems had national bans on mobile phones in schools, representing 58% of countries worldwide. Oden sees these moves as signs that more education systems are questioning whether constant digital exposure gives young children enough physical and sensory foundation for their education.

Still, she cautions that removing devices is only part of the conversation. From her perspective, schools also need to consider what replaces them. “If a screen comes out of a child’s hand and nothing richer enters the environment, we have only created an empty space,” Oden says. “Children need materials, movement, outdoor experiences, useful work, and adults who understand the development of maturity, regulation, and academics.”

Oden points to environments that allow children to dig, climb, build, carry, sort, balance, touch natural materials, and solve physical and relational problems as examples of learning spaces that better reflect embodied development. She believes these experiences can support attention and behavior because they give the nervous system meaningful information to process. In her view, children often appear more available for learning when the setting allows the body to participate.

The larger question, Oden suggests, is whether education is willing to update its assumptions. She does not frame the issue as a rejection of academics. Instead, she argues that academic learning can be strengthened when children are supported as developing bodies, nervous systems, and minds at the same time.

“Children are capable of extraordinary learning,” Oden says. “The responsibility belongs to adults to build environments that respect how development actually happens. When the body is invited into learning, the child is finally seen as a whole person.”

This article is for informational purposes only and does not substitute for professional medical advice. If you are seeking medical advice, diagnosis or treatment, please consult a medical professional or healthcare provider.