The Fictionalization of Development

Hey Everyone,

I hope you all had a Happy Thanksgiving. It was a little different being in Florida. Back at home, they were getting a snowstorm, and it was like eighty degrees here. Of course, I had to brag to all my family… but since they all know how much I love snow, that didn’t really work. I admit it—I was jealous. LOL. (Yes, I’m one of those people who actually likes snow. Don’t judge me. 🙂)

For anyone who read my last series, Insane or Inspired, I’m not sure if I should apologize for your time or not. 😂 The research for that blog was fascinating to me (because I’m a big nerd), and I decided to dive in a little deeper.

Well… that’s not exactly what happened.

At first, I decided to do something lighter. Something fun. I thought I’d analyze three blockbuster book series: Harry Potter, Twilight, and Fifty Shades of Grey.

Hey—don’t call it a book report. My research is way more important than that. 😄

Besides, I didn’t even read two out of the three series, so technically I can’t do a book report. But I did learn—thanks to my mom—that there’s an owl or something in Harry Potter. (How do you like that research :)...)

So over the last couple weeks, I started digging in… and I was a little surprised. A common thread runs through these stories that connects directly back to the last blog in my previous series. So either that’s a sign—or I’m just seeing what I want to see. 😏

In the last post, Co-Creating the Legacy of My Message, I explored the idea that the ultimate purpose of development is to learn to create—that creating is the deepest level of learning. (There’s a bunch of other nerdy stuff in there too. But you get the gist.)

Anyway, at first I began looking at these stories—Harry Potter, Twilight, Fifty Shades—through the lens of spiritual and cultural waves. I’ve always been fascinated by what happens when a story hits millions of people all at once. There’s almost always a spirit behind it.

But the research led me in a different direction - You're Welcome :).

I started to notice a linear pattern. Or maybe I’m just fitting puzzle pieces together. That’s always possible. 😄

But hey, since I’ve got the time—why not follow the rabbit trail?

What I noticed is: Harry Potter is about Power (or Agency). Twilight is about Identity. Fifty Shades of Grey is about Intimacy.

And when I started digging into that pattern, I found that these are actual stages of human development—corrupted in their fictional form - but eerily accurate when it comes to sequence.

To understand why this pattern shows up so clearly in our stories, we first have to examine what we believe development actually is.

ROOTED ASSUMPTION

When I hear a word like development, I’ll admit—I assume I already know what it means. Don’t we all?

We assume it’s about growth. Maturing. Helping a child become all they’re meant to be.

Most of us never stop to ask how that development actually happens. Sure—people debate strategies: parenting styles, school models, curriculum. But what we often overlook is that all those strategies are built on an unspoken premise.

(And I’m learning that if you want to uncover what’s really going on underneath any topic, always look for the unspoken premise. That’s usually where the truth is hiding.)

The hidden—but nearly universal—premise behind our understanding of development goes something like this:

A child is a blank slate—an empty vessel. And it’s our job—parents, teachers, pastors, society—to fill that vessel with the right information. Values. Beliefs. Behaviors. And if we get the input right, then the output will be a mature, moral, productive adult.

It sounds both reasonable and responsible.

And this premise is deeply ingrained in our culture whether we realize it or not. If this were just a personal opinion, we could dismiss it. But this belief shows up consistently across history, psychology, and modern institutions.

• John Locke (1693) gave us the phrase tabula rasa—“white paper void of all characters”—and argued that knowledge comes from experience poured in.

• John Watson (1924), the father of behaviorism, famously claimed: “Give me a dozen healthy infants… and I’ll guarantee to take any one at random and train him to become any type of specialist I might select… regardless of his talents, tendencies, abilities, or ancestry.”

• Google “child development,” you’ll find definitions like: “The process by which a child gains knowledge, skills, and behaviors through education and experience.” (Notice the assumption: development is something gained—something added.)

• Physical architecture of our institutions are set up with rows (or pods) of desks where children sit still and listen, one adult (the expert) at the front that shares predetermined information delivered to passive listeners. (Some people may say they don’t believe kids are blank slates. They’ll acknowledge personalities or temperaments. But the setup only makes sense if the child is fundamentally an empty vessel waiting to be filled.)

These facts and many others suggest that, functionally, we believe development means filling a child with the right content so they can become “someone.”

REVEALED IMAGE

If we believe development is about pouring the right content into children, then of course it makes sense to send children to systems (schools, churches, etc) that can fill them with the correct knowledge to better their lives.

But here’s a Fun Fact: When we look at the origins of the modern school system, the primary goal of school was to make obedience reflexive, to make freedom of thought difficult, and to shape not just what children know, but what they want.

In 1763, Prussia established one of the first large-scale universal, graded, state-run education system. While publicly framed as a moral and civic project, its deeper concern was social stability and unity in a rapidly modernizing state.

After Prussia’s military defeat by Napoleon (1806–1808), leaders did not attribute failure to lack of knowledge or skill. They identified independent will as the problem.

Philosopher Johann Fichte articulated the solution directly:

“The new education must destroy freedom of will…[Students] must simply be unable to will otherwise than you wish them to will.”

That became the official philosophy. And it worked.

Over time, the system produced obedient, punctual, low-conflict workers—ready for war or factory life.

I know there are widespread arguments on the merits of the educational system, but that's not the part I want to focus on. I was more fascinated to learn their goal was to change the Independent Will of a child to mold his/her will to that of what the state wanted.

Even more fascinating than the stated goal was the method of HOW they achieved that goal.

You can't shape a child's will directly. Any parent can verify that. Try telling a toddler that he/she wants to eat broccoli. I'm sure that toddler will let his opinion on that matter be known loud and clear.

Since you cannot tell a child directly what to WANT, you have to convince them another way. You have to go through the body.

That is what the creators of our modern day institutions understood. In order to shape a child's will, first you need to control the child's environment and what their bodies experience physically. Children were shaped through:

• fixed schedules and repetition

• restricted movement

• enforced posture and silence

• centralized authority

• removal of competing relational influence

(Because it is fascinating, I included a chart at the end of the blog detailing just how intentional Prussia was when designing the system to meet their end goal.)

This begs the question... Why does controlling a child's body lead to shaping their will? And what does this have to do with development?

Before a child decides what he wants, what he values, or who he is.... His / her nervous system is already asking a more basic question: Am I safe.

Because our bodies first and foremost want to be SAFE, whoever controls a child's sense of safety ends up shaping the child's wants, beliefs, and identity.

RE-EXAMINED EVIDENCE

So why does controlling a child’s body shape development at all? To answer that, we have to look at how development actually begins.

Development does not begin with thought.... It begins with regulation.

A child is not born capable of reasoning, interpreting meaning, or forming beliefs. Those capacities require a functioning cortex — and the cortex does not operate independently. When the nervous system detects threat, higher reasoning reliably shuts down.

Before thinking can occur, the body must first establish safety. We can see this clearly in early development.

Newborns do not respond to explanations or instruction. They respond to tone of voice, facial expression, touch, proximity, rhythm, and consistency. Distress appears when those signals are disrupted. Calm returns when they are restored.

These responses appear before language, before memory, and before learning. They are not taught. They are automatic.

This tells us something important: long before a child can ask Who am I? or What do I believe?, the nervous system is already organized around one question: Am I safe?

That question is activated immediately by environment.

Simply placing a child in a new environment is enough to trigger safety-seeking behavior. Without instruction or explanation, the child’s body begins adapting:

• Who holds authority here? What behavior avoids correction or threat? What patterns bring approval or protection?

This happens before understanding or agreement. It is bodily adaptation, not cognitive persuasion.

Modern neuroscience explains why this pattern is so consistent. The brain develops from the bottom up, in a fixed sequence:

• Brainstem: Am I safe?

• Limbic system: Am I loved and connected?

• Cortex: Who am I, and what can I create?

  
  

These stages cannot be reversed. If regulation is unstable, higher reasoning cannot reliably activate. No amount of information overrides that order.

This is why development follows the same progression:

Regulation → Relationship → Reasoning

And this sequence reveals something critical.

Children are not empty vessels waiting to be filled.

• The brain is born with roughly 100 billion neurons — more than it will ever have again.

• Early development is about organizing and pruning existing connections, not adding content.

• Secure attachment predicts long-term outcomes more accurately than early academic achievement.

  
  

In other words, the child is not neutral at birth.

RE-FRAMED BELIEF

Once we understand that a child is not an empty vessel—but a prewired, living system —our understanding of development has to change.

Here’s a fun fact: The word "develop" means "to bring out the capabilities or possibilities of something"

But the etymology is even better.

"Develop" comes from the Old French desveloper, meaning “to unwrap, uncover, or unveil.” It literally means: “to unwrap what has been wrapped.” Or: “to bring into view what was hidden.”

That changes things, doesn’t it?

Because it means development was never about adding something that’s missing. It was about uncovering something that was hidden.

Which—let’s be honest—is basically the opposite of what most of us were taught.

That shouldn't surprise us. God did say His thoughts are higher than ours and His ways are not our ways. (So… it probably shouldn’t shock us when the truth turns out to be backwards from what we assumed.)

Back to the point...

If we believe the child is an empty vessel, we’ll spend our lives trying to pour in the “right” knowledge—assuming knowledge is the gem. But if the child already carries something unique - their own message, their own design—then our job isn’t to fill them. Our job is to unwrap them.

Unwrapping and filling are two completely different postures. Unwrapping assumes something valuable is already there.

And that changes everything - because instead of trying to engineer who they become, we need to learn how to uncover what God already placed inside.

REFLECTIVE INVITATION

How did our understanding of development get so flipped that we now assume it works almost the opposite of how it actually does?

As humans, we make sense of experiences after we’ve lived them. We go through something first, and only afterward does the mind step in to interpret what happened. We reflect, we name it, and then we turn it into meaning.

However, we often remember the explanation and forget the bodily process that made the learning possible.

Think about learning to ride a bike. We usually say, “You just practice and eventually it clicks.” But what actually happened was being steadied externally, wobbling, falling, and slowly adjusting until the body learned how to balance internally.

When a lesson is passed down as a story or idea—without the bodily process that made the learning possible—fictionalization occurs.

The problem with fictionalization... it never stays small. A thought that is detached from the body cannot hold its value. Like any currency that is cut off from the physical thing that backs it (think of the dollar that was backed by gold), the value must inflate to still feel true.

As we are all prewired to seek agency, identity, and intimacy (the process of identifying our soul )... fictionalization causes what should be a physical process to become rooted in the mind and therefore subject to inflating when it does not become grounded in the body. What this starts to look like is:

Agency becomes imagined power instead of practiced action.

 Identity becomes romanticized meaning instead of lived continuity.

 Intimacy becomes eroticized sensation instead of embodied presence.

When development is separated from the body, it doesn’t disappear. It relocates. Agency, identity, and intimacy are still sought — but no longer discovered from the inside out.

And when that happens, we are not developed. We are shaped — into expectations, systems, and stories that were never meant to tell us who we are.

This is the lens I’ll be using in the Embodied Blockbusters series — to explore how our most influential stories simulate development when embodiment is missing.

I hope you all have a great day :)

Jacqueline Marie

APPENDIX

1. What Prussia actually did (This table reflects widely noted critiques of the model’s structural incentives and long-term outcomes when applied rigidly—not a claim that every educator shares these intentions)

Prussian Technique	Functional Goal	Result they measured and loved
Compulsory attendance 6–8 hours/day, age-segregated	Remove child from family, tribe, nature, multi-age play	Child’s primary loyalty shifts from parents to State
Bells, rows, raise hand to speak	Train body to respond instantly to external signals	Punctual, reflexively obedient soldiers & factory hands
Sit still for hours	Suppress bodily self-regulation and exploratory movement	Adults who self-soothe with consumption, not agency
One adult lecturing, 25–30 same-age peers	Destroy natural mentor/apprentice relationships	No transmission of tacit skill, character, or wisdom
Constant external evaluation (grades, ranks, gold stars)	Make child’s worth contingent on performance for authority	Adults with external locus of control, anxiety, burnout
Rote memorization + corporal punishment for “wrong” answers	Train the nervous system to fear mistakes and crave approval	Population terrified of risk or dissent