#004 - THE OTHER 167½ HOURS

ISSUE #004 | THE OTHER 167½ HOURS | WHY SKILLS DON'T ALWAYS TRANSFER

THE INSIGHT

A child can have a great teacher.

A great therapist.

A great program.

They can make real progress during a 30-minute session.

But then what?

They return to the other 167½ hours of their week.

One idea keeps showing up as I move deeper into my doctoral research:

Children do not develop inside programs. They develop inside systems.

We often focus on whether an intervention itself is good. Is the curriculum research-based? Is the teacher skilled? Is the therapy effective?

Those things matter.

But I am beginning to see that there is another question we need to ask:

What happens to the skill when the child leaves?

A child may learn to wait during a structured activity, follow directions during therapy, or control their body during a movement class.

But the real goal is not simply being able to use that skill in the place where it was taught.

The real goal is being able to carry that capacity into life.

WHAT THE RESEARCH TELLS US

Research on child development and intervention points to something important: a strong program alone does not determine what happens next.

Implementation research shows that outcomes can be influenced by the conditions surrounding a program—things like how consistently it is delivered, whether adults understand and support it, what resources are available, and whether the larger environment makes it possible to use what is being taught.

That is a research finding: the quality of an intervention matters, but so does the system around it.

Research on learning and development also raises the challenge of transfer, sometimes called generalization.

Learning a skill in one setting does not automatically mean a child will use that skill in another.

A child may be able to control an impulse when standing in a quiet line with clear directions. That does not guarantee the same level of control when the classroom is loud, another child grabs a toy, or something unexpected happens.

My interpretation of these ideas together is that we may be asking too little when we only measure whether a child improves inside a program.

The bigger developmental question is whether the capacity becomes available to the child across different people, places, demands, and situations.

And that leads to an important hypothesis:

Perhaps we can improve carryover by designing experiences that intentionally help children practice the same underlying capacity across changing conditions—and by helping the adults and environments around the child support that capacity too.

That question is becoming increasingly important in my work.

WHY IT MATTERS

Think about how much of a child’s week happens outside any one intervention.

A child might spend 30 minutes in therapy.

Thirty minutes in a movement program.

A few hours in a classroom where a specific skill is being taught.

Then life keeps going.

There are siblings.

Transitions.

Playgrounds.

Busy classrooms.

Bedtime.

Birthday parties.

Frustration.

Waiting.

Noise.

Disappointment.

Those environments place very different demands on a child.

This changes how I think about a child who can demonstrate a skill in one place but struggles somewhere else.

Maybe the question should not immediately be:

“But we know they can do it. Why aren’t they doing it?”

A better question may be:

“What is different about the conditions here?”

The child may have developed some capacity without yet being able to access it under greater demands.

That distinction matters.

Because the goal of development is not to create a child who performs well under one carefully controlled set of conditions.

It is to build capacity that becomes more flexible, more available, and more usable as life changes around them.

RESEARCH FOR THE REAL WORLD

This insight is changing what I am building.

For nearly 30 years, I have worked with young children in structured group movement environments. I have watched children learn to wait, listen, persist, remember sequences, manage impulses, recover from mistakes, and control their bodies.

Those are professional observations, not research findings.

But they have led me to an important question:

How do we help those gains travel?

That question is one reason I am developing Capacity Training.

The goal is not simply to teach a child another set of skills in another isolated program.

I am designing it to help create a bridge between the capacities a child is building and the places where that child actually needs to use them.

That means looking beyond the child alone.

What happens at home?

What happens at school?

Where does the child succeed?

Where does the same child struggle?

What changes between those environments?

And how can we intentionally create opportunities for the child to practice the same underlying capacity across different demands?

For example, if a child is developing inhibitory control, we should not only ask whether the child can “show self-control” during one familiar activity.

We might intentionally change the conditions.

Can the child wait when other children are moving?

Can they remember a rule while doing something physical?

Can they stop one action and switch to another?

Can they use that same growing control when the environment becomes less predictable?

Then we have to go one step further.

Parents, teachers, coaches, and clinicians can begin looking for opportunities to connect those skills across environments.

Instead of saying:

“They can do this in therapy, so I know they can do it here.”

We might ask:

“What helps this child access that capacity there—and how can we build some of those supports here?”

Maybe the child succeeds when directions are shorter.

Maybe they do better when movement comes before waiting.

Maybe they need repeated practice under gradually changing conditions.

Maybe the environment is demanding more capacity than the child can consistently access yet.

That shifts our response.

Instead of expecting transfer to happen automatically, we can begin designing for it.

The intervention still matters.

The teacher still matters.

The therapist still matters.

The program still matters.

But none of them exists alone.

If we want skills to become part of a child’s life, we have to think about the bridge between the place where a capacity is built and all the places where it needs to be used.

Because ultimately, the goal is not just to build capacity.

The goal is to build capacity that travels with the child.

THE BIGGER QUESTION

If children do not automatically carry skills from one environment into another, then perhaps we need to rethink how we define whether an intervention has truly “worked.”

It may not be enough to ask:

“Did the child improve?”

The bigger question is:

What does it take for a capacity built in one place to become available to a child everywhere else they need it?

That question changes what we measure.

It changes what we design.

And it may change what we mean when we say a child has truly learned something.

SOURCE

Durlak, J. A., & DuPre, E. P. (2008). Implementation matters: a review of research on the influence of implementation on program outcomes and the factors affecting implementation. American Journal of Community Psychology, 41(3-4), 327–350. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10464-008-9165-0

Barnett, S. M., & Ceci, S. J. (2002). When and where do we apply what we learn? A taxonomy for far transfer. Psychological Bulletin, 128(4), 612–637. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.128.4.612

Bronfenbrenner, U., & Morris, P. A. (2006). The bioecological model of human development. In W. Damon & R. M. Lerner (Eds.),Handbook of Child Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1002/9780470147658.chpsy0114.chpsy0114