Both are learning to manage themselves under pressure. But what a child can hear, and what actually reaches them, changes with development. We teach to the stage, not the birthday.
Erikson describes the task a young person is working on — what the behavior is really about. Piaget describes the cognitive equipment they have to work with — what kind of instruction can land.
A facilitator choosing what to teach needs both. Telling a six-year-old why a stance matters is wasted breath; showing them is the whole lesson. Telling a sixteen-year-old only to copy you wastes what they can now actually do.
Two children of the same age can be at genuinely different developmental positions, so the bands below are a guide, not a rule. A facilitator's read of the individual child comes first, every time.
This framework is built into the program's records system rather than kept in a binder, which is how instruction stays consistent when staff change.
Scroll the table sideways to see all columns.
| Age | Developmental task | Thinking | What that means on the mat |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5–7 | Initiative vs. guilt | Preoperational, moving toward concrete | Rules have to be embodied, not explained. Demonstration over description, and correction that doesn't shame. |
| 8–11 | Industry vs. inferiority | Concrete operational | Competence is the engine. Visible progressions, counted repetitions, earned rank. Inferiority is the injury to prevent. |
| 12–14 | Identity vs. role confusion, onset | Concrete moving toward formal | Peer comparison intensifies and abstraction is still unreliable. Forms become identity material. |
| 15–17 | Identity vs. role confusion | Formal operational | Principles and hypotheticals now work. The why of a form matters as much as the how, and they help design their own practice. |
Scroll the table sideways to see all columns.
| Stage | What we're building | Forms | Practices |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5–7 | Arousal and impulse | Animal forms; short mirrored sequences | Modeled breathing; freeze-and-release games |
| 8–11 | Frustration tolerance and persistence | Counted basics; Qi Gong ShiBaShi excerpts; stick form fundamentals | Box breathing; praise for effort rather than result; progress charting |
| 12–14 | Peer reactivity and self-consciousness | Paired forms with rotation; Yang 24 openings | Reframing with concrete physical anchors; rotating who leads and who follows |
| 15–17 | Anger pathways and rumination | Full Yang 24; Sun 73 selections | Values clarification; mapping triggers; teaching a younger student |
That last row is the one worth pausing on. Having a sixteen-year-old teach an eight-year-old does two things at once: it gives identity work somewhere real to go, and it hands back the sense of competence that the younger years were building. Two developmental tasks, one structure.
Facilitators teach. They are trained to notice when something a child brings to the floor is beyond what a training program should be handling — and at that point the job is to hand off, not to treat.
Referral goes to licensed behavioral health professionals. The line between instruction and clinical care is deliberate, and the records system enforces it: licensure and mandated-reporter status are recorded per staff member, and access follows from the role.
Instruction is led by Darrell A. Hall, MD — fifty years of training in Goju Ryu, Shaolin, Qi Gong, and Yang-style Tai Chi, still practicing several times a week, and a residency-trained family physician with fourteen years in community practice.