Your child’s behaviour is not the problem.
It’s the message.
For 25 years, Dr Maxine Thérèse has known something that science is only now catching up to: children arrive in the world as whole, integrated beings — body, mind, and spirit.
And when they struggle, they are not misbehaving they are communicating an unmet foundational need.
Dr Maxine's Foundational Needs Model gives parents, educators, and practitioners a map to read that communication — and respond to it in a way that supports true child wellbeing.
Three questions that change everything
What if your child’s behaviour is not a problem to manage, but a message to read?
Western models diagnose children’s expressions of unmet needs as pathology, often medicating or managing the signal rather than addressing its source. The Foundational Needs Model offers a different starting point: the symptom is information.
What if the child is not incomplete, but already whole?
Every major Western framework understands the child in relation to what it is not yet. Dr Thérèse’s research proposes a different definition: the child is whole — in body, mind, and spirit — from birth. That single shift changes every question we ask about children.
What if what you do for children matters less than what you help them do for themselves?
Without helping children understand their needs and how to meet them for themselves, it matters not what we do for them, even with the best intentions.
childosophy / child-os-o-fee/ noun
Means ‘child’s wisdom’ - a philosophy of wellbeing for children and our inner child.
A whole-child philosophy and practice framework developed by Dr Maxine Thérèse.
A research-backed, whole-child framework integrating neuroscience, psychology, family systems theory, and ancient wisdom.
For Parents
You already know something is going on beneath the surface. A recurring stomach ache, a meltdown that comes from nowhere, a child who simply won't settle.
Childosophy gives you a way to read what your child is communicating through their behaviour and their body, so you can respond to the need beneath the symptom, not just the symptom itself.
For Educators
Children don't leave their unmet needs at home. When a child can't focus, withdraws, or disrupts, they are not being difficult, they are asking a question their words can't yet form.
Childosophy gives educators a research-backed framework for reading those signals and creating optimal conditions for children to learn.
For Professionals
Most therapeutic and developmental models were built for adults and adapted down. Childosophy offers something different: a framework built around the whole child, integrating neuroscience, epigenetics, and body-based wisdom.
Childosophy provides clinical depth and practical precision that existing models are unable to reach.
Deakin University Alumni
IICT Premier
Training Provider
CPD Accreditation
Meditation Australia Accreditation
Published by
Simon & Schuster
Published by Rockpool Publishing