The Whole Child

“What many schools get wrong is that academics are only part of the puzzle. You have to educate kids’ socio-emotional sides: their feelings, their relationships with others, and their relationship with themselves. It’s important to develop a positive selfimage.” Romani says the final part of the ‘whole child’ puzzle is a child’s physical well-being. “If you neglect a kid’s physical education and nutrition, it completely undermines all the other work that you are doing with that child. It’s no good trying to nurture a child with great academics and a stable emotional level if the child isn’t eating properly, because then they’re constantly either hyper or lethargic, because their body isn’t getting what it needs. Kids need an outlet to burn off their energy and a chance to get a proper physical education.”

At Pear Tree, all three components of the whole child are built-in to the schools’ daily routine—a mandatory healthy hotlunch program and daily physical activity are something in which all students participate. Accompanying this is Pear Tree’s use of short-term and long-term goal setting for each child. This ensures that every stakeholder (school, parent, child) is constantly working towards meaningful and tangible goals—sort of like an IEP (Individualized Education Plan) for every student.

Romani says that children’s development is hindered when schools and families focus solely on just one aspect of their well-being. “Teaching the whole child is basically about recognizing that all of those things are interrelated. You need to treat all the components with equal importance. For example, take the sports-focused families that want their kids to be great athletes; their academics suffer, and perhaps even their personalities suffer, as a result of such extreme competitiveness. Conversely, you’ve also got families that focus only on their kid’s academic success. Look what that does to their physical and social well-being.”

As a family, you can compensate for those shortcomings by taking extra-curricular activities in those areas. “Every family has different values; it’s all about balance at the end of the day.”