Some early childhood approaches offer what is an explicitly unhurried approach to young children’s experience, in which key aims are to respect and protect the boundaries of early childhood.
These approaches commonly define ‘the early years’ as extending to the age of six or seven, when children begin to gain conscious control of their thought processes. These approaches base their attitudes to pedagogy on the understanding of child development in the years from three to seven, carefully gearing learning opportunities to young children’s emerging consciousness.
They recognise the damage that can be caused by developmental imbalance, especially wishing to avoid too premature or precocious an intellectual development in the child, at the expense of physical, emotional and social development (e.g. Goddard Blythe, 2004; Bingham and Whitebread, 2012).