How to Address Siblings Who Have Different Learning Needs

For parents of children with varied social-emotional and academic needs, daily life can feel especially challenging. In The Absorbent Mind (1949), Maria Montessori described childhood as its own vital developmental stage and emphasized that children learn best through real work and play. Her well-known quote, “Play is the work of the child,” reminds us that what adults often label as play is, for children, purposeful and essential. Through self-directed activity, children develop skills, build concentration, and shape their personalities—making play a serious and necessary part of growth.

Montessori’s work introduced both her educational methodology and the concept of sensitive periods—windows of development when children are especially receptive to learning certain skills. She believed that recognizing these moments allows adults to offer specific activities that meet children where they are developmentally and support their unique needs. With a background in Early Childhood Education, Montessori education, and Educational Therapy, I hope to shed light on this topic and offer parents practical, actionable tools they can use to better support their children.

The Need for Order

If you have very young children from 1-3 years old, create an ordered space with child accessible environments and labels for storage. If young children can access the materials, they can also be encouraged to put things away on their own. Order can also be expressed in repeated routines. Children at this age flourish when they have a predictable day, and things tend to run more smoothly when we know what happens next.

Try having a picture schedule posted at the child’s eye level and offer accessible spaces for children, like step stools to wash hands at sinks, and storage at the child’s level. Include their art, try creating a mini museum! Offer choices in workspaces as well, with rollable rugs or table spaces. Remember that in a Montessori environment, it’s not just the activity that is part of the learning, it’s also the actual procedure from beginning to end, the going to get the activity and the putting it away, which reinforces their need for order through the procedure of steps. Order remains important for children up to the age of 6 years old.

For the ages 2-6, fine-motor refinement becomes very important; the development of the ability of children to use their hands effectively for refined fine-motor activities is crucial for the development of their independence and as a precursor to writing. Children seek to master their environment through precise hand-eye coordination, and are building the foundational skills through muscle memory, concentration, self-care, and logical thinking through the accomplishment of tasks like pouring, buttoning, and tracing letters. Offer your child activities that use tongs, transferring things like cotton balls, small objects etc., from one bowl to another. Water pouring from one cup to another, another, using a funnel to pour water into a cup, are all very popular with this age.

Practical Life

Focus on self-care and care of the environment. For ages 3-6, offer activities to explore, tastes, sounds with access to sensory bins using beans, rice, cotton balls etc. and allow children opportunities for children to engage in washing objects and food preparation. Involve them in recipes, invite children to help with daily tasks in the home: sweeping, scrubbing, washing vegetables, offer child-sized spaces with smocks, and hang them in easily accessible spots where children can reach them. Montessori stressed the importance of children to do real work, such as polishing silver with a soft cloth or washing the tables and setting them. All this helps encourage autonomy and self-reliance.

For early elementary 6–9-year-old children, social skills and morality become very important. Model grace and courtesy for this age: emphasize please, thank you, and create opportunities for cooperative play with their siblings and peers. Team activities that are fun resonate with this age. Also, children have a strong sense of justice too, take time to work problems out as a mediator in conflicts, model listening to both sides of the story for this age and practice coming to a resolution. Offer choices to children, ask open-ended questions, and invite them to find the resolution together. Reasoning and abstraction are on their radar too; Introduce more complex patterns, sequences, and problem-solving activities. Children at this age also start to become the mentors of the younger children they are around. It is beneficial to invite children of this age to help their younger siblings or peers through modeling and demonstration.

Real-World Work

For children 9 and up, introduce opportunities for real-world work. Community engagement, abstract thinking, and developing independence all become increasingly important. Montessori believed that children begin to ask “why” things work, fostering creativity, problem-solving, and becoming responsible contributors to society, often through mixed-age groups and self-directed
projects. Suggest involving your adolescent youngster in community action, volunteering for a cause they believe in, or encourage a passion, think of group projects with children on the block or with siblings.

In closing, these phases—called sensitive periods, as Montessori termed them—offer parents an opportunity to become thoughtful guides. By providing the right support at the right moment, parenting can feel less overwhelming and more aligned with children’s natural growth and development, even when navigating siblings with different ages, social-emotional profiles, and learning needs.

Written by Vanessa Fontana-Berul

Vanessa holds a Masters in Education, as well as an Elementary Montessori credential, from Xavier University. Vanessa has over a decade of experience with dual language learning, as both a teacher and an administrator, for Spanish and Chinese bilingual ECE and Kindergarten programs in the SF Bay Area. Vanessa is trained in the Orton-Gillingham methodology and has over 20 years of experience supporting students with learning challenges.