Stuart Shanker is a Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus of Philosophy and Psychology at York University, the creator of Shanker Self-Reg®, and the Founder & Visionary of The MEHRIT Centre.
To understand Shanker Self-Reg®, it helps to understand the remarkable path that led Stuart to it.
Over more than five decades, Stuart’s work has crossed philosophy, psychology, child development, neuroscience, education and the science of stress. He has explored how human beings develop, learn, communicate and connect, and how stress can change those capacities from one moment to the next.
Stuart’s influence reaches far beyond any one discipline, profession or country. Researchers, governments, education systems and communities around the world have drawn on his work, but its deepest significance lies in the change it makes possible between people. Stuart has given us a way to see beyond behaviour and recognize the human being beneath it: the child struggling to cope, the parent searching for understanding, and the educator or professional whose own energy and well-being matter every bit as much.
At the heart of his life’s work is a profoundly hopeful idea: when we understand what is happening within us and between us, we can respond with greater wisdom, compassion and possibility. We can see differently, and in seeing differently, begin to change what happens next.
The story begins somewhere unexpected.
Stuart began his university education in English literature at the University of Toronto. A scholarship took him to Oxford University, where he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics before completing graduate work in philosophy and the philosophy of mathematics.
His early research examined fundamental questions about language, thought, artificial intelligence and learning. His 1998 book, Wittgenstein’s Remarks on the Foundations of AI, grew from his study of Wittgenstein’s critique of mechanistic theories of learning.
At Oxford, Stuart also studied with developmental psychologist Jerome Bruner. That work drew his attention towards child development and the roles that emotion, relationships and social engagement play in the development of language and thought.
York University appointed Stuart to both its philosophy and psychology departments in 1986. This unusual combination allowed him to continue working across disciplines and bringing together ideas and research that rarely appeared within the same conversation.
Over the years, he collaborated with academics, scientists and clinicians across developmental psychology, anthropology, linguistics, primatology, neuroscience, human development and education. This interdisciplinary foundation became essential to the development of Shanker Self-Reg®.
In the late 1990s, Stuart began working closely with developmental psychiatrist Stanley Greenspan. Their collaboration produced The First Idea, an ambitious and provocative book that challenged prevailing accounts of how language and intelligence develop by placing emotion and social interaction at the centre.
In 2005, the Milton and Ethel Harris Foundation awarded Stuart a $7 million grant to establish a cognitive and social neuroscience centre at York University. Stuart directed the Milton and Ethel Harris Research Initiative, known as MEHRI, where he helped lead research exploring ways to strengthen children’s capacities for shared attention, reciprocal interaction and functional communication.
The MEHRI research included a randomized study of a social-interaction-based intervention for autistic children. Researchers examined how supporting social engagement and parent-child interaction could strengthen communication and language development. Published findings showed greater gains for children in the intervention group on several measures of functional language during parent-child interactions.
Stuart also served as the first President of the Canadian Council for Early Child Development. He worked closely with Fraser Mustard and Margaret McCain and co-authored Early Years Study 2: Putting Science into Action.
His work has taken him into research centres, universities, governments, education systems and communities in Canada and internationally. He has advised government organizations on early child development across Canada, the United States and other countries. In 2012, Western Australia named him its Thinker in Residence.
Through these experiences, Stuart increasingly focused on stress.
He saw that stress affects far more than how someone feels. Stress changes energy, attention, emotion, social engagement, behaviour and learning. It can make capacities available in one brain-body state and much harder to access in another. It can also lead adults to interpret a child’s actions as defiance, poor motivation or lack of self-control when something very different may lie beneath the surface.
These understandings became the foundation of Shanker Self-Reg®.
Shanker Self-Reg® begins with a powerful idea, captured in Stuart’s words: “See a child differently, and you see a different child.”
That shift in how we see can change everything between us.
Shanker Self-Reg® reframes behaviour not simply as a matter of willpower, motivation or choice, but as a window into the brain-body system. Instead of asking only how to stop or change a behaviour, we begin asking: “Why this? Why now?”
The “why now” is rarely one thing. Each person experiences a changing combination of biological, emotion, cognitive, social and prosocial stresses. Those stresses can interact and multiply, affecting how much energy a person uses, how they feel, how they think and learn, how they relate to others, and what they can manage in a particular moment.
Self-Reg challenges the compliance lens many of us inherited: the belief that a person understands what is expected and should simply do what they are told. It opens a wider view grounded in science, curiosity and an understanding of individual differences.
At TMC we call this looking with soft eyes. Soft eyes look beyond labels such as “bad,” “lazy,” “defiant” or “difficult.” They help us see a brain-body system doing what it has learned to do in response to everything a person has experienced and is experiencing now.
What happens within us is also deeply connected to what happens between us. Human beings do not develop, learn or self-regulate in isolation. Our earliest relationships shape these capacities, and relationships continue to influence stress, energy, regulation and growth throughout our lives.
Shanker Self-Reg® is a science-based method for looking beneath behaviour to understand and manage stress, restore balance, and support growth-promoting ways of self-regulating.
We are all self-regulating all the time. But not every way of self-regulating supports well-being and growth. When stress becomes too great, we may find ways of regulating that help us get through the moment but use enormous energy or make it harder to learn, think, connect or recover.
Self-Reg is not about becoming better at enduring stress or pushing through depletion. It helps us understand stress well enough to recognize what is happening, reduce the stress load and support a return towards balance, connection and growth.
The Five Domains of Stress help us explore the totality of stress across five interconnected domains: biological, emotion, cognitive, social and prosocial.
The Five Steps of The Shanker Method® bring this understanding into daily life
These are not five steps to check off, produce compliance or manage someone else’s behaviour. Together, they form a practice that deepens over time. They help us listen, understand stress, build awareness and support restoration and growth.
People who learn with us often say, “Once you see it, you can’t unsee it.” Many arrive because of something they are encountering in their work or parenting. As they learn to see a child’s behaviour differently, they often begin to see their own stress, state and capacity differently too.
In 2012, Stuart founded The MEHRIT Centre as a Self-Reg learning and information centre for parents, educators, the leaders of today and the leaders of tomorrow.
He created TMC to bring the science of stress and self-regulation beyond universities, research centres and academic journals and into everyday life and practice.
The MEHRIT Centre gave people a place to explore Stuart’s interdisciplinary work deeply, connect it with their own experiences and apply it within families, schools, organizations and communities.
As Founder & Visionary of The MEHRIT Centre, Stuart continues to shape its intellectual and educational direction. People learn directly from his thinking and teaching throughout TMC’s facilitated courses, self-paced learning, masterclasses, books, videos and recorded presentations.
Stuart has written and contributed to books spanning philosophy, language, human development, education, neuroscience and self-regulation.
These selections represent only part of Stuart’s extensive body of books, chapters, journal articles, reports and public writing.
Stuart has semi-retired from public life, but TMC continues to offer many ways to learn directly from him and his work.
His courses, books, videos, masterclasses and recorded presentations explore the science of stress, the foundations of Shanker Self-Reg®, and what this understanding can mean for children, adults, families, schools, organizations and communities.
Stuart also gives one in-person talk each year at the Self-Reg Summer Symposium.
Stuart is semi-retired at this point in his career and no longer accepts presentation or media requests.
The MEHRIT Centre can help organizations find other experienced Self-Reg speakers, facilitators and learning options.
