Study · Children
Children, through play and building
Regulation and relational safety taught to children through collaborative building and play, where a child practises staying present, taking turns and repairing when a build falls.
01The Study
Children do not learn regulation by being told about it. They learn it in their hands. This study reaches the MABERT capacities through structured building and play: collaborative tasks with clear roles, turn-taking, and the small repairs that happen when a tower falls and the group has to steady itself and begin again.
The block-building spine draws on established play-based methods, where children take roles such as engineer, supplier and builder and have to coordinate to succeed. Around that, the facilitator works as a co-regulator, so a child feels the return to calm before being asked to name it. Awareness, regulation and relational safety are practised, not lectured.
Measurement is built for children. The biomedical channel is non-invasive, and no finding rests on a young child’s self-rating alone. The people who see the child most, teachers and parents, carry the informant channel, and each child and parent co-set the goals that the sprint is scored against.
Every group in a participating setting receives the full programme. Consent is given by a parent and assent by the child, a safeguarding lead is present, and no child is placed in a group that waits. What varies between groups is only when they begin, and that staggering is what lets us separate the programme from the ordinary course of a term.
02Measurement
Five channels, tuned to this cohort.
Biomedical markers
Non-invasive only. Wearable heart-rate variability and sleep, with salivary cortisol.
Self-report
Age-appropriate wellbeing measures, read alongside adult report so nothing rests on a child's self-rating alone.
MABERT leader report
Facilitator observation of each child across the six capacities, session by session.
Friend or informant report
Teacher and parent report using an established behaviour measure, with peer report for adolescents.
Goal movement
Goals co-set by child and parent, scored on a fixed scale across the sprint.
03The Six-Week Split
What this sprint reports, and what waits for the long arm.
Reported at six weeks
- Emotional regulation in session and at home
- Heart-rate variability and sleep
- Wellbeing on age-appropriate self-report
- Movement on co-set goals
- Facilitator-observed capacity change
Reported from the long arm, with the reason
- Developmental and learning gainsThese run on a developmental clock, not a six-week training clock. They are read at follow-up.
- Durability after the group endsWhether a change holds is a follow-up question by definition. It is measured at three and six months on the same children.
04Goals & Ethics
Personalised goals, no one withheld.
Goals. Co-set by the child and a parent, scoped to the sprint, such as staying with a group task through frustration.
Multiple baseline across groups, staggered by enrolment wave. Every group receives the full programme; only the start dates differ. Consent and, where relevant, assent are taken before anything begins, under an approved ethics protocol. Our stance is stated plainly: we do not withhold the programme in the name of research.
This study is in design. The right partner shapes it before it begins.