When was the last time your child sat completely still — not because they were told to, not because a screen had them locked in — but because something was genuinely, quietly beautiful?
A picture book with soft watercolour illustrations. A slow afternoon watching clouds. A story told at a pace that let them breathe.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately, esoecially after reading The Colours of Childhood: Bauhaus, Crayola and the History of the Ugly Primary.
Because somewhere between the era of Heidi and Bambi and where we are now, something shifted. And I'm not sure we noticed it happening.
Then and Now
Think about the cartoons and shows you watched as a child, or the ones you sat with your own children to watch when they were small.
There was a pace to them. A gentleness. The colours in early Disney films — those warm, painterly backgrounds, the muted greens of a forest, the soft golden light of a cottage window — were beautiful in a way that invited you in rather than demanding your attention.
Now look at what's on the screen the next time a young child is nearby.
Chances are it's loud. It's fast. The scene changes every few seconds. The colours are cranked up to full saturation — screaming yellows, blinding reds, electric blues.
Characters are bouncing and spinning and singing at a relentless pace that barely gives you a moment to catch up before something new is happening.
We've been told — and we've largely accepted — that children need things to be brighter, louder, and faster to stay engaged.
But what if that's not true? What if we've been getting this spectacularly wrong?
What the Research Tells Us
Here's the thing that stopped me in my tracks when I came across it.
A study published in the journal Pediatrics found that just nine minutes of watching a fast-paced cartoon was enough to significantly impair a four-year-old's executive function. We're talking about their ability to focus, to regulate their emotions, to follow instructions, to solve a simple problem — all measurably worse after less than ten minutes of the kind of content many children watch for hours every day.
Nine minutes.
The children who spent the same time drawing, or watching a slower-paced educational program, showed no such decline.
The researchers pointed to two things: the sheer pace of the content, and the fantastical, unpredictable nature of what was happening on screen.
When a child's brain is constantly trying to orient to new, unexpected, impossible events — things that couldn't happen in the real world, happening faster than they can process — it depletes their mental resources.
By the time they come away from the screen, there's simply less left for the work of thinking, listening, or sitting with something quietly.
This matters enormously.
Because the brain gets calibrated to what it regularly experiences.
A child who spends a lot of time with fast, highly stimulating content gradually finds everything else — reading, playing, listening to a teacher, exploring the garden — dull by comparison.
The bar for what counts as interesting keeps rising. And the things that are actually most nourishing for their development start to feel like hard work.
It's Not Just the Screens
Now here's where it gets closer to home — particularly for those of us who spend time in classrooms.
Walk into almost any early childhood setting and count the colours.
Go on — really look.
The chairs, the tables, the shelves, the storage boxes, the display borders, the rugs. I'd be surprised if you counted fewer than ten competing colours before you reached the book corner.
We've come to accept bright primary colours as simply what children's spaces look like. It's so normalised we don't question it anymore.
But we probably should.
Research on classroom environments has found that children in heavily decorated spaces with lots of competing colour actually performed worse academically than children in more calm, sparsely decorated rooms.
Brain research goes further, suggesting that environments using more than six colours can actively distract learners and interfere with information retention.
And a study specifically looking at preschoolers found that children playing on brightly coloured surfaces showed more frustrated, disruptive behaviour than those playing on plain white surfaces — not because of how they were feeling, but because the visual noise was making genuine demands on their attention without them even being aware of it.
Soft blues, greens, and natural tones, on the other hand, are consistently associated with calm, reduced anxiety, and better concentration. The environment isn't neutral. It's always communicating something to the children inside it.
The History of the Ugly Primary
That brilliant article I mentioned before on Substack — The Colours of Childhood: Bauhaus, Crayola and the History of the Ugly Primary — I'd really encourage you to read.
It traces exactly how we arrived here: how a particular set of ideas about colour, childhood, and simplicity converged into the visual world children now inhabit.
It made me think. I hope it makes you think too.
Because it's worth asking: who decided that children's spaces should look like this?
And was it actually based on what children need — or on something else entirely?
The Good and the Beautiful
In classical education, there's a concept that doesn't get talked about nearly enough in modern schooling: the pursuit of the True, the Good, and the Beautiful.
Beauty isn't a luxury. It's not extra. It's not something we get to once the "real" learning is done.
Beauty is formative.
It shapes something in a child — a sense of what is worth attending to, a capacity for stillness, an inner life that has room to grow.
When children spend their days surrounded by beautiful things — gentle illustrations, natural materials, soft and thoughtful colours, stories told at a pace they can actually feel something about — something is being cultivated in them that can't be measured on a test but matters enormously for who they become.
When we fill every surface, every corner, every screen with noise and brightness and relentless movement, we aren't enriching children.
We're overwhelming them.
And the cost of that, I think, is higher than we realise.
What Can We Actually Do?
I know this can feel a bit overwhelming when you look around and see how pervasive it all is. But small things genuinely matter here.
At home:
- Be intentional about the programs your child watches. Seek out slower-paced content — Puffin Rock, Bluey, classic stories read aloud, nature documentaries narrated gently. The difference in your child's behaviour after watching will tell you something.
- Look at your child's play space. Does it feel calm? Or is it visually busy? You don't need to redo everything — even swapping a few bright plastic items for natural wood or neutral tones makes a difference.
- Bring real picture books back. The kind with illustrations worth looking at slowly.
In the classroom:
- Take a fresh look at your walls and displays. More isn't always better. A few thoughtful, beautiful things will always outperform a wall covered in bright borders and laminated everything.
- Consider your colour palette. Neutral shelves, soft tones, natural materials — these aren't minimalist for the sake of it. They're giving children's brains room to breathe.
- Slow things down where you can. A story told slowly, a question left to sit for a moment, a quiet activity without background noise — these are gifts.
A Final Thought
We can't undo everything that's happened in children's media and design.
But we can make choices, day by day, about the environments we create and the things we put in front of children.
We can choose beauty.
We can choose calm.
We can choose things that are worth looking at twice.
And in doing so, we're teaching children something that no screen can: that some things are worth slowing down for.
Want to create a learning environment that's beautiful, calm, and genuinely inspiring for children? I've put together a free download to help you get started — whether you're rethinking a corner at home or looking at your whole classroom with fresh eyes.
👉 Click here to download your own copy
Read the blog post How to Create An Inspiring Indoor Learning Environment which sets out all the factors to consider when you're putting together a space for children.