How to Foster a Love of Learning Without Overcomplicating Things
A curriculum for a six-year-old
I built a curriculum for my eldest once, she was six, just as I was starting my PhD, with her little sister not far behind at four and a half. It was an actual curriculum, with objectives, a rough weekly structure, and a private little sense of pride that I was doing this properly, the way someone with a doctorate in progress ought to.
It lasted about a week and a half before I noticed my daughter had started going quiet and slightly wary whenever I pulled out “the folder,” which is a genuinely awful thing to realise about something you built with love. She wasn’t resisting learning. She was resisting me turning an ordinary afternoon into a lesson she hadn’t asked for.
I think a lot of parents who came up through some kind of rigorous academic training carry this same instinct without noticing it. You’re trained for years to plan, structure, sequence, assess. It’s a genuinely useful skill in a PhD program. It is a much less useful instinct to bring home to a six-year-old who just wants to look at a bug for eleven straight minutes for reasons that make sense only to her.
The bug on the driveway
The moment that actually shifted things for me happened not long after I quietly retired the folder, out of exhaustion more than insight, if I’m honest. We were walking to the car one morning, already running late, and my eldest stopped dead over a ladybug on the driveway.
I had precisely zero plan for this. No printed worksheet about insects, no structured questions written in advance. She just crouched down and started asking things. Why does it have that many legs. Where’s it going. Does it have a mum. Can ladybugs hear.
I answered what I could and admitted honestly when I didn’t know the rest, and we ended up looking a few things up together that evening, entirely because she’d asked, not because I’d assigned it. It took eleven minutes. I’ve genuinely never seen her that engaged during any of the folder’s carefully sequenced activities.
That contrast sat with me for a long time afterwards. A planned, structured, objective-driven session that fizzled within days, against eleven completely unplanned minutes on a driveway that she still, as far as I know, half-remembers as an adult. The lesson wasn’t subtle once I actually let myself see it. I’d been building scaffolding for a kind of learning that doesn’t need scaffolding. It needs room.
Unlearning something I’d spent years learning
Knowing this, though, turned out to be a completely different thing from actually living it, and this is the part I think gets skipped over in most tidy parenting stories. Retiring the folder didn’t retire the instinct behind it. That instinct had been trained into me for the better part of a decade, and a bad week with a bored six-year-old doesn’t undo a doctorate’s worth of habit.
For a long stretch afterwards, I kept catching myself doing smaller, sneakier versions of the same thing. Turning a walk into a “let’s count the red cars” assignment when nobody had asked for one. Interrupting a genuinely curious tangent because it wasn’t the topic I’d mentally planned for that morning. I had to physically stop myself, more than once, from correcting the direction of a conversation just because it had wandered somewhere I hadn’t scheduled.
There was a guilt tangled up in letting go of the structure too, and I don’t think it gets talked about enough. Somewhere in my head, unstructured felt like it meant unserious, like I was coasting rather than parenting properly, especially given how much of my own identity was wrapped up in rigour and planning at the time. Letting a morning be genuinely open, with no objective attached, felt uncomfortably close to giving up.
My younger daughter made this even more complicated, because she wasn’t the same child at all. Where my eldest would happily crouch over a ladybug for eleven minutes, my younger one wanted to move fast, touch everything, and rarely lingered anywhere long enough for a proper conversation to develop. I caught myself, more than once, quietly worrying that the approach that had worked so well with one daughter simply wasn’t working with the other, as if I’d found the right method and then had it fail on delivery.
It took longer than I’d like to admit to realise the method hadn’t failed, I’d just been applying a fixed idea of what curiosity was supposed to look like. My younger daughter’s curiosity showed up as motion and rapid-fire questions rather than long, still focus, and once I stopped expecting her to be a quieter version of her sister, the same underlying approach, noticing and responding rather than directing, worked for her too. It just looked completely different on the outside.
The comparison trap, from the other direction
It didn’t help that plenty of the parenting content I came across at the time pointed the opposite way, elaborate enrichment programs, structured curricula for young children, flashcard systems promising a head start. I remember feeling a strange kind of pressure from two directions at once, my own instinct to over-plan, and a wider culture telling me that more structure was always better, more academic, more serious, more likely to produce a bright, capable child.
What eventually cut through that wasn’t a parenting book. It was simply watching, over and over, which version of a morning actually produced a genuinely engaged, chatty, curious child, and which version produced a wary one clutching a folder she didn’t want. The evidence was sitting right in front of me the whole time. I’d just been too committed to my own plan to look at it properly.
It wasn’t only my own instincts I had to push back against either. I remember a relative once watching my daughter spend a long stretch of a family visit doing nothing more structured than sorting pebbles by size on the back step, and asking, not unkindly, whether she shouldn’t be doing something more educational. I didn’t have a confident answer for that at the time. I just knew that pulling her away from the pebbles to do something that looked more like learning would have ended the actual learning that was already happening.
That kind of gentle social pressure is easy to underestimate. Nobody directly tells you that unstructured time is wasted time, but it’s implied constantly, in the toys marketed as educational, in the programs promising a head start, in the mild concern on a relative’s face when a child is “just” playing. Holding the line against that, quietly and without a great explanation ready every time, turned out to be its own kind of effort.
Learning the difference between simple and passive
There was a period where I overcorrected too, which is worth admitting honestly rather than glossing over. I went from over-structuring everything to being almost entirely hands-off, assuming any adult involvement at all was somehow contaminating her natural curiosity. That wasn’t right either.
A completely silent, uninvolved adult isn’t actually what fosters curiosity. What I eventually settled into was something in between, noticing what she was already interested in, and gently adding a little to it rather than redirecting it entirely. If she was fascinated by the ladybug, my job wasn’t to stay silent, it was to actually engage with her questions rather than either ignoring them or turning them into a structured unit on insects. The involvement mattered. The engineering of it didn’t.
What this looks like on an ordinary day now
These days, when I talk to parents about this, I try to make it as unglamorous as it actually is. It’s not a method. It’s mostly restraint.
If a child stops to look at something, the job is to notice that they’ve stopped, not to hurry them along toward whatever was next on the actual agenda. If they ask a question, the job is to actually answer it, or admit you don’t know and look it up together, rather than folding it into a lesson plan you’d already decided on. If a walk to the shops turns into a fifteen-minute stop to examine a snail, that’s not a delay to the real activity. That was the real activity, and it arrived on its own without you having to engineer it.
It might help to see the same ordinary moment played out two different ways, the carpenter version and the gardener version, since the difference is genuinely small in the moment even though it compounds into something quite different over time.
Breakfast, carpenter version: a child asks why the milk went off, and gets steered gently but firmly back to finishing their cereal because there’s a school run to manage. Gardener version: the same question gets thirty honest seconds, bacteria, cold, a quick “shall we check the date on the next one,” and then breakfast continues anyway. Neither version costs meaningfully more time. Only one of them tells a child their question mattered.
Bath time, carpenter version: a structured “educational” bath set with numbered foam letters, deployed nightly whether the child’s interested that evening or not. Gardener version: whatever the child’s actually doing with the water that night, pouring, sinking, floating, gets a comment or a question added to it, and the letters stay in the cupboard on the nights nobody’s reaching for them.
A trip to the park, carpenter version: a mental checklist of the “educational” equipment to steer a child toward, counting steps on the ladder, naming shapes on the climbing frame. Gardener version: following wherever the child’s own interest actually goes that day, even if it’s twenty straight minutes fascinated by an ant trail near the bench rather than anything on the checklist.
None of the gardener versions above needed a folder. It barely needed planning at all. It mostly needed me to notice what was already happening in front of me and resist the urge to redirect it toward something more structured, more visibly educational, more like what I thought good parenting was supposed to look like from the outside.
If you’re reading this from a classroom rather than a lounge room
Engel’s research was actually done in classrooms, not homes, so it’s worth saying plainly that this isn’t only a parenting problem. A curriculum, timetable, and a room full of children with different questions at different moments is a genuinely harder environment to protect curiosity in than a single afternoon with your own child, and I don’t want to pretend otherwise from the comfort of having mostly done this one on one.
What seemed to help in the classrooms Engel studied wasn’t abandoning structure altogether, that’s simply not realistic with a class of twenty five and a curriculum to cover. It was building small, deliberate pockets where a genuine question could actually be followed for a minute or two before returning to the plan, rather than every question being treated as an interruption to it. A quick “that’s a brilliant question, let’s actually think about that for a second” costs very little time and tells a room full of children that their curiosity is welcome, even inside a structured day.
If you’re a teacher rather than a parent, the folder metaphor still holds, it’s just distributed across more children at once. The same restraint applies, noticing when a genuine question has come up, and giving it thirty real seconds before moving back to the lesson, rather than defaulting to “not now” the way the teacher in Engel’s research did with that ninth grader asking about art.
Where this idea comes from
The psychologist Susan Engel, who studies curiosity at Williams College, spent time in ordinary classrooms specifically looking for it, and found remarkably little. In some classes she observed, children asked only two to five curious questions across an entire two-hour period, even though children at home, by some estimates, ask something closer to twenty-five questions an hour. The gap wasn’t because the children had run out of curiosity. It was because the adults around them, often without meaning to, were treating a child’s questions as an interruption to the actual lesson rather than as the lesson itself.
That’s uncomfortably close to what I was doing with the folder, treating my daughter’s genuine curiosity as something to be scheduled around, rather than the actual point. In one classroom Engel observed, a student raised her hand mid-lesson to ask a genuinely interesting question, and the teacher’s response was to stop her and say there wasn’t time for questions right now, it was time for learning. Reading that line back, years after retiring my own folder, was uncomfortably familiar. I hadn’t said those exact words to my daughter, but I’d absolutely communicated the same thing by pulling her attention back toward whatever I’d planned instead.
Engel’s research also points to something more encouraging though, that curiosity isn’t simply a fixed trait a child either has or doesn’t. She describes it as something that can be nurtured or, just as easily, quietly discouraged, depending on how the adults around a child respond to their questions and their attention. A researcher she cites, Elizabeth Bonawitz, describes curiosity as a kind of preparation for learning, the way a cook lays out ingredients before actually cooking. The folder, in hindsight, skipped that preparation entirely and tried to serve the meal before anyone was hungry for it.
Psyche’s coverage of Engel’s research goes into this properly if you want the fuller picture, including how adults can gently nudge curiosity along without smothering it, which is really the balance I eventually found by accident.
The cognitive scientist Alison Gopnik has a metaphor for this that I wish I’d had years earlier. In her book The Gardener and the Carpenter, she contrasts two models of parenting, the carpenter, who works to a fixed plan and shapes a child toward a predetermined outcome, against the gardener, who creates good conditions and then lets growth happen in whatever direction it actually goes. I was, without question, trying to be a carpenter with children who needed a gardener. This interview with Gopnik explains the idea properly, in her own words.
Knowing when you’ve slipped back into the folder
I still catch myself occasionally, even now, decades on from that folder, defaulting to structure when someone else’s curiosity would serve better. A few signs I’ve learned to watch for in myself, in case they’re useful to anyone else. Redirecting a conversation back to what you’d planned, rather than following where it’s actually gone. Feeling a flicker of impatience when a simple errand takes longer because a child’s stopped to look at something. Reaching for a worksheet or an activity before actually checking whether the child in front of you is already curious about something else entirely.
None of those are catastrophic on their own, everyone slips into planning mode sometimes, myself included, still. But noticing the pattern is most of the fix. Once I could see it happening, backing off got a lot easier than it had been when I didn’t have a name for what I was doing.
Where this connects to the worksheets
This is really the same instinct behind every story-based tracing page we make, and I don’t think I’d have landed on that approach without the ladybug on the driveway teaching me the lesson first. A blank tracing page with no context is the carpenter’s approach, a fixed task with one correct outcome. A tiny story attached to the same letter is closer to the gardener’s approach, a small amount of good soil, then room for a child to actually engage with it rather than just comply with it.
If you want to see that in practice rather than just read about it, the alphabet tracing template is one real page from the bundle, and the personalised storybook template leans on the same idea from a different angle, giving a child just enough of a hook to want to keep going on their own.
What I’d tell the version of me building that folder
My girls are grown now, and neither of them remembers the folder. I know because I asked. What they do both remember, independently, is a ladybug on a driveway on a morning we were already running late for something.
If I could go back, I wouldn’t tell myself to stop planning entirely, structure has its place and I still believe that. I’d tell myself to stop mistaking my own comfort with structure for what she actually needed. She needed me to notice when she’d already found something worth being curious about, and to have the restraint to let that be enough.
A small hook, not a curriculum, that’s the whole idea behind these.
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