You can take the child out of the jungle, but you can’t take the jungle out of the child
Once upon a time, childhood unfolded in motion. Feet pounded the earth. Eyes tracked flying insects. Ears tuned to birds, wind, and the subtle tones of distance. Every sound, every step, every glance taught the child where they were — not just in space, but in the living field of relationship between self and world. The child was both perceiver and participant in the great rhythm of life. Today, much of that jungle has been traded for a glowing rectangle. The rhythm has flattened to a flicker. The body, once an orchestra of sensing and responding, sits still. What we call “screen time” is not merely time on a screen; it is the gradual dismantling of the body’s dialogue with the world. And that loss may be reshaping how the brain develops its most fundamental capacities — hearing, language, attention, and emotional attunement.
The Body Hears Before the Mind Understands
Recent research has revealed that walking fine-tunes the auditory system. As we move, the brain dynamically adjusts how it listens — increasing sensitivity to the ear on the side we’re turning toward, reducing the opposite ear’s sensitivity, and constantly recalibrating in real time. Walking strengthens the brain’s ability to locate, filter, and prioritize sounds in space. For a child, this means that movement and hearing are intertwined teachers. Each wobbly step and every shifting gaze trains the nervous system to hear directionally, to distinguish the subtle difference between “near” and “far,” “left” and “right.” In short, walking teaches the child where they are through sound. When movement decreases, so does this dynamic tuning. The brain becomes less skilled at the dance between sound and motion. Hearing may remain intact, but listening—the integration of sound, space, and orientation—weakens.
Rhythm Builds the Architecture of the Brain
A second line of research adds another layer: when the brain listens to rhythm, its internal networks reconfigure themselves in real time. Neural systems shift frequency, form new connections, and couple slow rhythms with faster ones, linking sensory and cognitive processes. In developmental terms, this means that rhythm isn’t just enjoyable—it’s architectural. Every heartbeat, footstep, and syllable is a building block of the brain’s network coherence. Rhythmic movement and sound wire together auditory, motor, and associative regions, creating a foundation for attention, memory, and language. When a child moves to a beat — clapping, bouncing, walking — they’re literally sculpting neural pathways that support communication and emotional regulation. Without that rhythmic feedback loop, the brain’s architecture may remain fragmented, less integrated across its sensory and motor domains.
Dis-movement as Dis-connection
Enter the modern substitute: the tablet. Children now spend hours seated, eyes fixed, bodies still. What once was an embodied symphony becomes a static monologue. And according to speech therapists across the country, the results are showing up early and dramatically. In classrooms and clinics, therapists report a surge in children needing speech and language support.
- The cause is not mysterious: excessive screen time, both for children and caregivers, reduces live, interactive experiences that foster language development. As reported by Wisconsin Public Radio, key developmental activities are being missed: joint attention, shared play, adult narration of actions, and full-face visibility. A baby learns to speak not by hearing words but by watching faces, mimicking expressions, and synchronizing tiny muscles of the mouth and tongue with the parent’s visible cues. When that feedback loop is replaced by pixels and disembodied voices, the brain loses essential relational data.
- Even more subtle: when caregivers themselves are absorbed in screens, the child’s sensory world goes silent. The gaze — that primal bond of co-regulation — is broken. The parent may be physically present but neurologically absent.
The Jungle Within
Human beings evolved in an environment of movement, rhythm, and relationship. The “jungle” is not simply a place; it is a sensory symphony — the ecological hum that taught our ancestors how to hear, move, and connect. You can take the child out of the jungle, but you can’t take the jungle out of the child. The nervous system still expects that symphony: the rhythm of walking over uneven ground; the shifting resonance of sound as we turn our heads; the subtle interplay between facial expression, voice, and feeling. Deprived of these, the developing brain improvises with what it’s given — flat surfaces, uniform tones, one-directional light. It learns to process digital stimuli quickly but loses the depth of real-world nuance. A child raised on screens becomes hypersensitive to novelty yet underdeveloped in attunement. The result? A generation increasingly restless, distracted, and disembodied — not from moral failure but from sensory malnutrition.
From Flatness to Fullness
This is not an argument against technology but a call to remember what it cannot replace. No app can replicate the microsecond coordination between a mother’s eyes and a baby’s smile. No cartoon can teach the vestibular system how to balance during a spontaneous dance. No tablet can whisper to the inner ear how the world sounds when we turn our head toward a rustle in the grass. Reintroducing movement, rhythm, and relational sound into children’s lives is not nostalgic; it is neurological restoration.
- Let children walk and listen to their footsteps.
- Let them clap and sing and sway to music that moves through their whole body.
- Let caregivers put down their phones and narrate the ordinary moments of life: “That’s the wind,” “That’s your spoon,” “That’s my voice.” In doing so, we return to what the jungle already knows: development is not linear; it’s rhythmic, relational, embodied.
A Closing Reflection
Perhaps what’s most tragic is not that children spend too much time on screens, but that we’ve forgotten the living technology they already possess — a body attuned to movement, a mind tuned to rhythm, and a heart tuned to connection. When a child walks, listens, laughs, and responds, the whole organism learns to be in the world. That is the primal education — the one that screens can never simulate. The jungle isn’t behind us. It’s inside us, waiting for the child — and the adult — to move again.
John Harper is a Diamond Approach® teacher, Enneagram guide, and student of human development whose work bridges psychology, spirituality, and deep experiential inquiry. His newest book, Nurturing Essence: A Compass for Essential Parenting, invites parents to discover the role essence plays in child development. He is also the author of The Enneagram World of the Child: Nurturing Resilience and Self-Compassion in Early Life and Good Vibrations: Primordial Sounds of Existence, available on Amazon.