Professional: Teaching and Consulting

Professionally, for 18 years, Cecily contributed as consultant, researcher, and writer to preschool television programs and magazines with social-emotional, music, movement, science, and multi-cultural curricula. Simultaneously, she developed and taught music and movement, yoga, dance, plus gardening and nutrition to children, and their parents, age 18-months to 5-years-old.

Beginning with her private, Manhattan, preschool teaching days, Cecily questioned the pronounced and subtle behavioral issues exhibited by preschoolers and mislabeled too often as “bad-behavior.” Five questions quickly evolved:

(1) “Are there really good and bad children, or is it that there is effective and ineffective parenting?”

(2) “What if young children are expressing their lived stories, and the not yet integrated components, through their play, self-expression, and social interactions?”

(3) “Is it most supportive for adults to prune away at children’s behavior, making their potentially, big, tree selves into bonsai or to pay attention to behavioral cues as insights into an important communication and signal for help?”

(4)“What are the seeds, the causes, that are troubling the body, mind, and spirit of children who show fight/flight/freeze reactions in their interpersonal interactions?”

(5) “How can parents and teachers come to recognize and respond to children as coherent, whole, deeply feeling and perceiving people? Perhaps if the ‘misbehaving’ had context and understanding, and new skills were taught to help adults be with and navigate the developing nervous systems of young children."

These questions eventually opened the window into Pre and Perinatal psychology (PPN).