Rethinking Child Upbringing: Education’s Role Beyond Academic Learning

When we think about educating a child, the mind often jumps straight to classrooms, textbooks, and report cards. But education’s real work runs far deeper than that. According to the Global Partnership for Education, a holistic approach to education aims to develop the whole child – physically, socially, emotionally, and academically – with the active support of the wider community. In other words, bringing up a child well is inseparable from educating that child well. The two are not parallel processes; they are one and the same.

Education is more than knowledge transfer 🔗

There is a persistent tendency to measure the quality of education by academic outputs: grades, test scores, subject performance. These matter, but they represent only one dimension of a child’s growth. Holistic development in education nurtures all aspects of a child’s growth – intellectual, emotional, physical, social, and creative – in an integrated way. A child who can solve a quadratic equation but cannot manage frustration, cooperate with peers, or recover from failure is not fully prepared for adult life.

UNESCO’s Incheon Declaration for Education 2030 makes this explicit, stating that quality education includes the development of skills, values, attitudes, and knowledge that enable citizens to lead healthy and fulfilled lives and respond to local and global challenges. This is a formal, international acknowledgment that academic learning alone is insufficient – that upbringing and education must be understood together.

The role of exploration and discovery 🔗

Children are natural explorers. From the moment they can move, they touch, observe, test, and question the world around them. One of education’s core responsibilities in child upbringing is to protect and channel this instinct, rather than suppress it in favour of rote instruction.

The National Association for the Education of Young Children (NAEYC) describes playful learning as a context in which children explore, expand their knowledge, take risks, develop interests, and practice their social and emotional skills. This is not a luxury added on top of the “real” curriculum – it is the curriculum, especially in the early years. When children are given space to investigate and discover, they build cognitive flexibility, curiosity, and a genuine appetite for learning that structured instruction alone rarely produces.

Taking a holistic approach to education means establishing a child’s overall well-being as the foundation, because without well-being, learning becomes impossible. A child who is anxious, disengaged, or exhausted cannot absorb information regardless of how well it is presented. Exploration and discovery are not distractions from education – they are conditions for it.

Why play belongs in schools 🔗

Play is often treated as the opposite of learning, the thing children do when school is done for the day. Research consistently challenges this assumption. The American Academy of Pediatrics has confirmed that play enhances brain structure and function, promotes executive function, and supports the formation of safe, stable relationships that children need to thrive. These are not peripheral benefits – executive function underlies attention, planning, impulse control, and the ability to learn.

When children engage in play, they are working. Research from the Federation of American Scientists shows that when teachers and caregivers encourage play and exploration, children develop positive self-esteem and approaches to learning that carry them forward for years. The Centre for Science and Policy at Cambridge notes that when children engage in tasks as though they are play, behavioural thresholds are lowered – children try things out freely, set their own targets, and as a result, build resilience and confidence to meet physical, intellectual, and emotional challenges.

Reducing playtime in schools in the name of academic focus does not improve outcomes. A 2025 systematic review in the Journal of Intelligence found that open-ended, exploratory play significantly enhances problem-solving and creative thinking. Marginalising play undermines the very capacities children need to succeed academically and beyond.

Rest and relaxation as educational necessities 🔗

Alongside play, the importance of rest in a child’s educational experience is chronically undervalued. Schools optimised purely for content delivery tend to treat breaks as interruptions. But rest is not passive – it is when the brain consolidates learning, regulates emotion, and rebuilds the attentional capacity needed for further engagement.

Research published in Frontiers on mental health in educational settings confirms that during the school years, children are experiencing critical windows of development across physical, linguistic, emotional, and social dimensions simultaneously. Overloading these windows with relentless academic pressure produces stress, not learning. An education that genuinely takes child upbringing seriously builds in time for rest, reflection, and unstructured activity as a deliberate part of the school day – not as concessions, but as essentials.

Building self-esteem through education 🔗

One of the most important things education can do in the upbringing of a child is build a healthy, accurate sense of self-worth. Self-esteem is not a by-product of academic success – it is a prerequisite for it. A child who does not believe in their own capacity will not take risks, persist through difficulty, or engage authentically with learning.

American University’s School of Education describes how teachers can build self-confidence by providing multiple opportunities for students to demonstrate understanding in a variety of ways, recognising unique strengths, and making lessons relevant to students’ real lives. This is not soft pedagogy – it is evidence-based practice. Holistic development research consistently shows that maintaining balance across developmental domains contributes directly to children’s overall well-being and self-esteem, which is described as an invaluable cornerstone for adult life.

Studies on play and self-esteem have found that children who engage in cooperative play tend to show better social competence and higher self-esteem. When children experience achievement across different domains – not only in tests but also in creative projects, physical activities, and collaborative tasks – they develop a broader, more resilient sense of who they are and what they can do.

Teaching values and social skills as core educational work 🔗

Values are not caught accidentally. They are shaped through deliberate experience, modelling, and guided reflection. Education has always been one of the primary vehicles through which societies transmit the values they consider important – respect, empathy, honesty, civic responsibility. Research published in Frontiers in Psychology affirms that teachers act as mediators of values in school settings, and that value-related educational goals are a core function of the teaching role, not an add-on.

UNESCO’s policy guide on Social and Emotional Learning (SEL) describes SEL as a necessary expansion of the educational process – shifting from a sole focus on cognitive aspects to a balanced approach that includes social, emotional, and behavioural dimensions. The evidence is substantial: integrating SEL in schools improves academic achievement, reduces dropout rates, and improves overall mental health and well-being. Far from competing with academic goals, social and emotional learning actively supports them.

Social skills – communication, conflict resolution, collaboration, empathy – are not innate. They are learned, practised, and refined. Research synthesised by KQED’s MindShift makes the case clearly: cognition, emotion, and behaviour are mutually reinforcing. Adults – teachers and parents alike – make little progress when they target only the academic component in isolation. The child develops as a whole, or the development is incomplete.

The balanced child: what well-rounded development actually looks like 🔗

A well-rounded child is not one who excels uniformly in every domain. It is one who has had enough diverse, supportive experience to develop a positive sense of self, functional relationships, basic values, physical well-being, and an authentic engagement with learning. Effective holistic approaches within education systems, according to a joint publication by the LEGO Foundation, Porticus, and the Jacobs Foundation, lead to improved academic, health, employment, societal, and well-being outcomes across all countries – and represent smart long-term investments in children’s futures.

This means schools and educators need to think carefully about what they are actually optimising for. A curriculum that measures success purely through standardised test results is not measuring the full scope of what education is supposed to achieve. As holistic education research emphasises, children are not just learning machines – they are feeling, thinking, social, and imaginative beings with wide-ranging capabilities that education must serve, not flatten.

Bringing up a child well – giving them values, social competence, emotional resilience, a healthy self-image, and a love of discovery alongside academic foundations – is not separate from educating them. It is exactly what educating them means. The classroom is not a factory producing academic outputs. It is one of the most important environments in which a human being first learns what it means to live alongside others, to understand themselves, and to engage with the world.

What do you think? If schools were evaluated not just on exam results but on how well they nurture self-esteem, values, and social skills, how might teaching priorities shift? And what would it take for parents and educators to genuinely treat play and relaxation as non-negotiable parts of a child’s education, rather than rewards for finishing work?

References

1. https://www.globalpartnership.org/blog/learning-school-and-life-holistic-approach-child-development
2. https://www.ishcmc.com/news-and-blog/holistic-development-in-education/
3. https://www.epi.org/publication/making-whole-child-education-the-norm/
4. https://www.naeyc.org/resources/pubs/yc/summer2022/power-playful-learning
5. https://www.heischools.com/blog/what-is-holistic-development
6. https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/142/3/e20182058/38649/The-Power-of-Play-A-Pediatric-Role-in-Enhancing
7. https://fas.org/publication/playful-learning-improves-childrens-outcomes/
8. https://www.csap.cam.ac.uk/media/uploads/files/1/david-whitebread—importance-of-play-report.pdf
9. https://www.waldorfeducation.org/the-essential-benefits-of-play-a-research-based-perspective/
10. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10834646/
11. https://www.american.edu/soe/graduate/articles/what-is-holistic-education.cfm
12. https://teachkloud.com/play-pedagogy-and-curriculum/understanding-holistic-development-in-early-childhood-a-comprehensive-guide/
13. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/374419878_UNDERSTANDING_THE_ROLE_OF_PLAY_IN_PROMOTING_COGNITIVE_SOCIAL_AND_EMOTIONAL_DEVELOPMENT_IN_SCHOOL_CHILDREN_IMPLICATIONS_FOR_COUNSELLORS_AND_EVALUATORS
14. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1458393/full
15. https://www.unesco.org/en/articles/what-you-need-know-about-social-and-emotional-learning
16. https://www.kqed.org/mindshift/41008/beyond-academics-what-a-holistic-approach-to-learning-could-look-like
17. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/383556138_Holistic_Education_Approaches_Nurturing_the_Whole_Child