How social skill is developed in a child below 5 years (in Montessori)

It is surprising to observe that even a complex social skill can be imparted to a child of less than 5 years in Montessori. And, considering the surprisingly naive manner in which training is conducted in companies, I thought it would be useful for training professionals to understand how it is done in a Montessori school. 

Social skill is not sitting with someone else and listening others talk, joke, blabber, or patting each other’s back. Social skill is sitting with others to solve social problems and pursuing aims acceptable to all. Therefore social skill requires a skill to harmonise individual activities. If the latter is social development, then fostering social development requires developing five traits: 1) Acquiring self discipline to speak what is necessary, 2) respecting others time and presence, 3) taking care of common resources that belong to all, 4) listening to others with patience, and 5) utilizing each others to ask for help or give help, when necessary.

Let us see how these traits are developed indirectly in a Montessori School. No scholastic material is prepared to develop social skills of a child; instead, in Montessori,  an environment is created, which invokes specific experiences in a child, so that it enables the development of child’s social skills. Let us see how it is done. 

For instance, in a Montessori school, as many of the Montessori apparatus are found in only single sets, the child, who does not find what he wants to work with, needs to wait for it to come back to the shelf. This fosters patience and tolerance towards other children in the environment. The child learns to control the urge to grab the material from others and has to instead learn to live with others.

The child in a Montessori school has the freedom to move and work wherever he wants to. However, he quickly finds out that his freedom is not limitless. Like others can disturb him, he also realizes that he can be a source of disturbance to others. He has to therefore learn to inhibit his impulse to disturb others if he has to enjoy his own freedom of working himself. Unknowingly he learns to respect others. A child is not taught to respect others, instead he learns this through experience in a Montessori.

In a Montessori, a child has to take care of the material himself. Because everyone shares one set of material, the child understands that the materials are common resources used by everyone. He not only has to take care of the material, but also keep it back in the same state of preparedness and completeness that he got the material, after he finishes his activity. This itself promotes self-discipline and acute awareness of other’s needs, an important trait for social development

In a Montessori, children with diverse and mixed age group work together. Infact, the diversity in a Montessori enables child to experience different type of children: active, bubbly, silent, demanding, whining, talkative etc. Older children become heroes and teachers of the younger children, as younger children intuitively understand that when they will become older they will be able to do what older children can do. As a five year old child can communicate with a three year old far more easily than adult, a junior child often ‘ seeks help’ from the senior child about his activity instead of adult. This social experience of helping each other in a Montessori strongly promotes social skill development.

In other words, careful preparation of environment in a Montessori promotes social development better than any traditional classrooms. It is not done through specific actions, but through creating an environment, where a child learns through ‘experiencing’ instead of intellectual reasoning. As Paula Lillard mentions "Unlike traditional classrooms the children speak to each other and initiate activities together whenever they like. They are not forced, subtly or otherwise to share themselves with others when they are not ready or interested".


Amen !