It Starts With Two Small Leaves

Every spring when I was teaching first grade, we planted bean seeds.

Each child got a small cup of soil, a seed, and the very important job of checking on it every single day. We lined them up on the windowsill. We watered them. We waited.

And then one morning, something would break through.

It never got old. The excitement in that classroom when the first little sprout appeared, the running to the windowsill, the gasping, the calling across the room for friends to come look, it felt like magic every single time. Because it is. Watching something grow from nothing is one of those quiet miracles that never stops being wonderful.

But those first two leaves always surprised people.

They were small. Simple. Nothing like the bean plant on the seed packet. And every year, at least one child would look at them with wide eyes and wonder what on earth they were looking at.

I always loved that moment too.

Those first two leaves have a name: cotyledons. I first connected this word to the work I do through my mentor, Bette Lamont, a pioneer in NeuroDevelopmental Movement®, and it stopped me in my tracks. When I use this word with parents and teachers now, I always say the same thing: "This is a super scientific word that just means the first little leaves." And then I feel very smart for approximately ten seconds.

But here is why it matters.

Cotyledons are not the leaves that last. They don't look like the mature plant. They don't have the shape or complexity of what is coming next. But they are not skippable. They provide the initial energy. They support the earliest growth. They make it possible for the true leaves, the ones that look like the plant you were waiting for, to develop at all. Without them, the plant struggles. Remove them too early, and growth stops altogether.

One of my students cried the day the cotyledons fell off. I think about that child often. Because those leaves did exactly what they were supposed to do. They gave everything they had, and then they let go so the rest of the plant could grow.

That's not sad. That's the whole point.

In the first years of life, a child's brain and body are building their own version of cotyledons. Not reading. Not writing. Not sitting still at a desk. The things that make all of that possible later.

It starts on the floor. Belly crawling. Rolling. Hands-and-knees creeping. Learning to track something moving across a room. Building the kind of postural stability that lets a child sit upright in a chair without using every ounce of mental energy just to stay there. These aren't the warm-up acts. They aren't the cute stuff you do before the real learning starts. They are the real learning. They are the brain's first leaves.

I like to think of it like the foundation of a house. You can't build something strong on a shaky foundation. And yet, so often in schools, that is exactly what is happening. A child is struggling, and the instinct is to keep building. More practice, more repetition, a new program, more time. But the foundation underneath hasn't been fully laid. So things keep falling down. And everyone wonders why.

The teachers are working hard. The child is working hard. But nobody is looking at what is underneath.

Here is what I want every parent and teacher to hear: just because those early foundations were missed or rushed does not mean they are gone forever. The brain can still grow. The body can still build. Those early patterns, the belly crawling, the creeping, the vestibular system, can still be strengthened, even in a seven-year-old, even in a ten-year-old, even later than that.

The magic of growth does not have an expiration date.

So the next time you are watching a child work harder than they should have to, whether you are their parent or their teacher, try pausing before you reach for more of the same. Instead of asking what more do they need to learn, try asking what might be missing underneath.

A good place to start is with vision. Not whether a child can read the eye chart, but how their visual system is actually working to support learning. I put together a Vision and Learning Guide for exactly this reason. There is a section for parents to use at home and a section for teachers to use in the classroom. You can grab it here.

Because sometimes the most important work starts long before it looks like learning at all.

It starts with two small leaves.