Part 2: The first 1000 days of parenting: An interview with neuroscience educator Nathan Wallis

By GymbaROO

Missed part 1? Read it here.

Resilience in a rescue culture

The part of our conversation that stayed with me most was about resilience.

We are raising children in a rescue culture. We anticipate problems before they appear, smooth every frustration, and jump in the second our kids struggle. It comes from love — but Nathan suggests it can quietly backfire.

He draws a simple but crucial line between two kinds of stress:

• Toxic stress: a child faces difficulty with no support.
• Tolerable stress: the same difficulty, but with a supportive, loving adult nearby.

The difference is us. Our presence, our calm, and our confidence that they can figure it out.

“Instead of constantly ‘rescuing’ our children from frustration or failure, we can offer our presence and confidence. We can say, ‘I know this is tricky,’ without immediately solving the puzzle,” he says.

This is how perseverance is born. Children learn that frustration is survivable, that problems have solutions, and that they are capable of finding them.

Nathan argues that one of the greatest gifts we can give children under seven is a deep belief in their intelligence. As he puts it:

“The only way you can predict outcomes for a kid under seven is by asserting their disposition towards themselves as a learner… To have a really healthy brain, and to get good outcomes from the frontal cortex, you want to build brains one, two and three first.”

When foundations quietly change everything

One story Nathan shared has lodged in my brain. He described a Brain Gym exercise — drawing lazy eights in the air — that noticeably improved a child’s writing quality.

It wasn’t about drilling literacy. It was about building the physical foundation first, aka accessing brain #2 and #3to get to brain #4.

Zoom out, and you see a similar pattern at the system level. Take China’s recent shift away from formal literacy and numeracy lessons for children under seven, towards play based curricula only. It’s a government led acknowledgement that unstructured play and creativity build the brain regions that actually matter at that age.

Nathan’s concern is that many systems still rush to “teach Brain #4” — literacy and numeracy — while skipping the chance to consciously build Brain #3: emotion, attachment, and the felt sense of being safe and capable.

Question for you: If you zoom out on your week, which “brains” are getting most of the airtime in your home or classroom?

Practical wisdom for tired humans

If all of this sounds big, Nathan’s advice lands surprisingly small and human scale. You don’t need special equipment or hours of prep.

He talks about:

• Breathing in for six counts and out for four before you rush to fix something, so your nervous system is leading with calm.
• Holding space for “safe” challenges — small climbs, little risks — where children can try, wobble, recalibrate, with you nearby rather than taking over.
• Naming emotions instead of just fixing situations: “You’re so frustrated your tower fell.”

Underneath these ideas is a simple shift: away from constant rescuing, towards steady, regulated presence.

A book that feels like a conversation

Our interview was, in many ways, a preview of Nathan’s book What Were You Thinking!? It’s that rare kind of parenting book that doesn’t feel like homework. It’s accessible, warm, and often genuinely funny.

More than anything, it offers permission — to slow down, to trust instincts, to value connection and child led environments, and to recognise that early years spaces are fundamentally different to the formal, cognitively focused structures of school. If we recognise how vital these early years of development are, we can support the positive development of all 4 components of our children’s brains.

“It will not only change how you see your child,” Nathan says, “but also how you see yourself on this parenting journey.”

And in a world that constantly tells us to do more, be more and know more, that might be exactly the kind of science backed reassurance we need.