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In the just-released revised edition of Caring Spaces, Learning Places: Children’s Environments That Work, Jim Greenman discussed the advantages and disadvantages of child sizing our environmnents…

“Maria Montessori pioneered ‘child scaling.’ Familiar to us now, one can imagine the astonishment she evoked in her time. Child-scaled furnishings, equipment, and toys that allow children to behave competently and feel powerful are accepted as standard in children’s settings. But Montessori would have had trouble visualizing our present child-centered age in the United States; the child is no longer the ‘forgotten’ in the adult world. Now it is often the opposite; children are a huge market that is sold to and often deprived of reality and communion with the real world.

“One could argue that a program environment where everything is child scaled may be appropriate for those few children who spend most of their time in homes (particularly homes that make no concessions to child scale. But for children in all day settings and their caregivers, child scale is stifling and oppressive, as well as hard on the adults. A mixture of adult and child scale is valuable for both caring and learning and minimizes the teacher as an outsized Gulliver in a Lilliputian world.

“Child scale is critical where we expect children to become independent and competent. How neatly would you eat if the table were at chest level? How independent and competent do you feel if you can’t reach anything yourself? How secure do we feel when chairs are too high for our feet to touch the floor or when we have to reach on our tiptoes for essential materials? Utensils, sinks, toilets, water fountains, and storage units should be scaled to maximize independence.”

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