The Power of Three: Movement, Inequality, and Developmental Oxygen
Lately, three things have caught me off guard, three pieces of work that have made me sit with my thoughts, and re-examine some of my own theories and long-held curiosities. Each, in their own way, affirmed something I’ve always felt deep down: that so much of who we are, how we behave, and how we learn is rooted in our physicality. And yet, the world we’re living in gives less and less space for that to thrive.
Before I go any further, I want to acknowledge something important about how I talk and think about movement. When I talk about “reaching our physical potential,” I’m not referring to one specific kind of movement, like running, jumping, or rolling around outdoors. I mean movement in its broadest, most personal sense: what it means to be connected to and expressive through your body, within your capacity. This includes micro-movements, internal awareness, sensory integration, all the subtle and profound ways we relate to our physical selves.
Movement isn’t exclusive to those with full mobility. This work includes all bodies and all ways of being. We honour every individual’s relationship to movement, however it looks or feels, and strive to create environments where that relationship can deepen and thrive.
1. Seven Children by Danny Dorling
This book is a hard look at inequality and the challenges the next generation of children will face. It explores how poverty shapes childhood, not just in the obvious material ways, but in how it impacts identity, self-worth, and yes, physical development.
If you know me, you’ll know I often go on (and on) about how much we can trace current developmental struggles in children back to the physical, to underdeveloped vestibular systems, to reduced balance, poor coordination, and all the foundational things we rarely talk about. I truly believe that before we can support a child’s social, emotional, or even academic potential, we have to help them reach their physical potential, and when I say their physical potential I mean in the context of them, this is not exlusive to those who are able to move physically it’s been physical within the context of each individuals body from micros movements to macro movements, what it looks like to each individual is different and we include all bodies and all abilities when work within our own physicality.
What Dorling's book stirred in me, though, was a more complex question. While poverty clearly creates barriers to movement (lack of safe play space, access to sport, poor nutrition, etc.), could it also be true that wealth, in some ways, restricts it too?
Sure, affluence can afford a big garden, 1:1 coaching, gymnastics lessons. But what about the kind of free, curious, unstructured play that builds a body from the inside out? The sofa-leaping, tree-climbing, den-building kind? In our (to borrow from Taylor Swift) “label era,” have we boxed children’s physicality too early into tidy categories of sport or skill, leaving behind the raw, playful, upside-down physical discovery that children need?
What would a study look like that mapped wealth and movement development alongside one another? If only I’d gone to Dorling’s talk at Hay festival this week in Powys, asked better questions, and maybe even convinced him to offer me a research grant… (wishful thinking, but I can dream).
2. Angela Hanscom and the idea of ‘Developmental Oxygen’
In the same week, I listened to a podcast episode titled Why Modern Childhood Is Failing Kids’ Bodies and Brains, and there was Angela Hanscom, voicing everything I try to express in my own work. She spoke about the essential link between physical development and healthy learning, behaviour, and regulation.
But the moment that landed hardest was when she used the phrase “developmental oxygen.”
She was talking about outdoor, rough-and-tumble, full-body play, and how it’s not a luxury, not a bonus, not an extra. It’s developmental oxygen.
That phrase has stayed with me. It’s exactly how I’ve always seen movement. Not just as something that helps with obesity prevention, or improves handwriting, but as something fundamental. Oxygen for the growing brain and body. Something that, when it’s missing, causes suffocation across systems, cognitive, emotional, sensory.
It put words to what I’ve been feeling for years.
If you’re interested too: Why Modern Childhood Is Failing Kids' Bodies and Brains | Angela Hanscom, Balanced and Barefoot
3. Revisiting Smart Moves by Carla Hannaford
This book never leaves my side, even though it’s got a few outdated phrases and has been around for a while, it’s still one of the most insightful pieces I’ve ever read about learning and the brain. I returned to it recently during some reflective time about my own learning journey and the ongoing conversations around autism, ADHD, and neurodiversity in children.
One paragraph stopped me in my tracks:
"Stress is a root cause of many of the learning issues we see in people diagnosed as ADHD. You will learn things (in the book) to reduce the effects of stress in your life. The most important of these is to include more movement in your life, particularly integrative movements, requiring balance and coordination, that assist nervous system development and functioning."
It made me wonder, again, about the world our children are growing up in. A world full of noise, overstimulation, constant pressure, and less and less space for unstructured movement. Could stress be stunting nervous system development on a larger scale? Are we seeing behaviours emerge not just from diagnosis, but from systems under strain? Systems that were never given the movement they needed in the first place?
So here I am, again, sitting with the same deep knowing: that movement is key. Not just structured PE. Not just sports day. But real, full-body, full-spirit movement.
I believe more than ever that children, and adults, are desperate for less stress, more movement, and environments that feed their sensory systems, not just their minds. But how do we change that? Especially without a big pot of funding and a research grant?
I don’t have the answer yet. But I have the words: developmental oxygen. I’ll keep carrying that phrase with me, and maybe, keep building a movement around it.
