A Place Where the Whole Family Can Blooom

A REFLECTIVE AND RESEARCH-INFORMED VISION

Family wellness, relationship-based learning, and belonging at Bloom Family Studios

Katie Cimino

Founder and Director, Together We Bloom

August 2026

A Place Where the Whole Family Can Bloom

I have spent much of my life watching children attempt to fit themselves into spaces that were not built around the full reality of childhood. I have watched a restless child reach again and again for connection while a parent tended to a baby. I have watched one child need movement and conversation while another needed quiet, and I have watched an exhausted caregiver remain fixed in one place because there was no environment capable of holding those needs at the same time. I have seen families leave experiences early, avoid wellness spaces altogether, or decide that an outing simply was not worth the transition, the explanations, the dysregulation, or the possibility of being called back before they had even begun to exhale.

None of these families were failing. The children were not failing. Often, even the programs and the adults working within them were not failing. The shape being offered simply asked human beings with different bodies, nervous systems, rhythms, interests, and responsibilities to fit themselves into one predetermined mold. Bloom Family Studios began with the belief that families deserve another shape: one flexible enough to recognize that a parent may need less input at the exact moment a child needs more; one secure enough to hold a child’s feelings without making those feelings a reason the family cannot participate; and one rich enough that children are not merely waiting while the meaningful experience happens somewhere else.

Located at Murrieta Hot Springs Resort and developed through Together We Bloom, Bloom Family Studios is a family-centered wellness and community-learning space grounded in art, nature, science, history, relationship, and respect. It is not designed as conventional full-time childcare, nor is it simply an entertainment room attached to an adult experience. It is an evolving model of personalized support in which families may use the time they genuinely need, children encounter an environment they actively want to return to, and educators begin with relationship before asking for performance. Its purpose is not to separate the family experience into an important adult half and a lesser child half. Its purpose is to allow every member of the family to receive something meaningful and then return to one another with more capacity, more connection, and something worth sharing.

Families Do Not Live in Fixed Blocks of Time

Traditional care structures serve an essential purpose, but they do not fit every family or every season of life. Some families need a dependable full-time program. Others need two hours while a caregiver attends an appointment, several mornings each month for focused work, an occasional homeschool block, support during irregular work travel, or a meaningful experience for a child during a family vacation. Some parents know their schedule months in advance, while others are responding to a changing work shift, a visiting relative, a difficult morning, or the rare realization that they have enough time to care for themselves if help is available now. Requiring all of these families to purchase the same schedule does not create stability; for many, it creates another barrier.

This tension is not anecdotal alone. The United States Department of the Treasury described the national childcare market as burdened by insufficient supply, high costs, and structural market failures that leave families without adequate options even as providers operate on narrow margins (U.S. Department of the Treasury, 2021). The problem becomes more acute when a family’s needs fall outside the conventional model. The U.S. Government Accountability Office found that families of children with disabilities and parents with disabilities faced difficulty locating suitable care, barriers to full participation, communication problems, and provider shortages; some parents reduced work hours, left jobs, or moved because they could not maintain appropriate care (U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2024). These findings describe a system in which families are routinely asked to organize their livelihoods around the care that happens to exist rather than being met with care responsive to the lives they actually lead.

Bloom’s flexibility is therefore more than a scheduling feature. It is an expression of respect. We do not believe a family should be required to buy full-time care when full-time care is not what they need. We do not believe a caregiver should have to abandon a wellness practice, a work opportunity, a community event, or a needed period of rest because the available model requires a commitment their life cannot sustain. At the same time, flexibility cannot mean unpredictability for the child. Our work is to create consistent relationships, recognizable rhythms, thoughtful transitions, and a cohesive educational environment even when attendance patterns differ. The schedule bends; the quality of welcome does not.

Beyond Supervision: The Relationship Is the Curriculum

Families have told us time and again that they have avoided gyms and other wellness spaces because the childcare transition produced more stress than relief. Their children cried or melted down, the parent was called back, and the anticipated hour of movement or restoration became another experience of managing distress. Availability alone is not meaningful access if a child dreads entering the room or if a parent remains braced for the phone to ring. A space can meet every basic requirement for supervision and still fail to create the felt sense of safety that allows a child to explore.

I do not believe this is best understood as a failure of individual childcare workers. Many enter the profession because they love children and believe deeply in human development. They are also working inside a national system that chronically undervalues them. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the median wage for childcare workers was $15.41 per hour in May 2024, compared with $23.80 across all occupations, while projecting approximately 160,200 openings each year largely because workers will leave the occupation or labor force (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2025). When educators are underpaid, stretched across large groups, and asked to maintain safety without enough time for deep relationship, burnout is not a personal weakness. It is a predictable consequence of the structure.

Regulation and ratios are necessary protections, but compliance establishes a floor; it does not, by itself, create belonging. Bloom is built around the conviction that children need more than an adult who can see them. They need adults who can know them. The National Association for the Education of Young Children defines developmentally appropriate practice as a strengths-based, play-based approach to joyful and engaged learning. Its framework asks educators to consider what is generally known about development, the individuality of each child, and the family and community context in which development occurs (National Association for the Education of Young Children [NAEYC], 2020). It further emphasizes that educators gain essential knowledge through respectful, reciprocal partnerships that treat families as experts on their own children rather than as passive recipients of professional instruction (NAEYC, n.d.).

That reciprocity is central to Bloom. A caregiver is not simply handing us a child; they are entrusting us with a person whose communication, history, sensory needs, humor, fears, fascinations, and ways of entering relationship may not be immediately visible. Families tell us what helps their child settle, what an unfamiliar behavior may mean, what they are studying, what they are carrying emotionally, and what kind of day they have already had. Our educators then observe and respond. Personalization does not mean constructing an isolated curriculum for every child. It means creating multiple invitations into the same rich environment and taking each child’s response seriously.

We Create Family, Not Classrooms

When I imagine the emotional atmosphere of Bloom, I do not first imagine a classroom. I imagine walking into a beloved grandmother’s home: the kind of place where love is already flowing before you cross the threshold, someone is genuinely delighted that you have arrived, and the picture, rock, question, invented creature, or half-finished story you carry in your hands is received as absolutely brilliant. There is food and conversation, movement and rest, beauty without preciousness, and an understanding that you belong before you accomplish anything.

This warmth does not replace educational intention. It makes educational intention possible. Our educators are continually preparing materials, observing development, extending investigations, supporting communication, and considering the emotional impact of our responses. The difference is that learning is woven through relationship rather than imposed through control. One child may paint the intended subject. Another may become absorbed in the way water changes the paint. Another may invent a story about the materials, while another watches quietly before choosing whether to participate. We do not see only one correct outcome surrounded by deviations. We see four children revealing how they think.

The science of development supports this relational orientation. Harvard’s Center on the Developing Child describes responsive back-and-forth exchanges between a child and caring adult as ‘serve and return’ interactions that help shape neural connections underlying communication, social development, and emotional well-being. It also notes that financial pressure, isolation, health concerns, and other forms of caregiver stress can make sustained responsiveness harder, which is why programs that support adults help strengthen children’s developmental environments as well (Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University, n.d.). Bloom’s concern for caregiver wellness is therefore not separate from its concern for children. Supporting the adult’s capacity to breathe, move, work, heal, or reconnect can be part of supporting the family system in which the child develops.

Play is equally serious. The American Academy of Pediatrics explains that developmentally appropriate play supports social-emotional development, language, cognition, self-regulation, executive function, and safe relationships with caregivers (Yogman et al., 2018). At Bloom, play is not a reward offered after learning is complete. It is one of the principal ways learning becomes visible. When children negotiate a shared construction, invent rules, test the balance of materials, narrate an imaginary world, or revise a design that has fallen apart, they are practicing precisely the forms of flexibility, communication, reasoning, and persistence adults later claim to value.

Social-Emotional Development Comes First

At Bloom, social-emotional development is not a lesson scheduled between art and science. It is the foundation beneath every interaction. Before asking what a child completed or produced, we ask whether that child felt safe, whether their voice mattered, whether they could communicate a need, whether their boundaries were respected, and whether they experienced enough agency to remain connected to themselves while participating in a group. Academic and creative learning matter deeply to us, but they cannot be separated from the emotional conditions in which learning occurs. Curiosity expands when children feel safe enough to risk being wrong. Communication develops when they trust that someone is listening. Collaboration becomes possible when adults model respect rather than simply demanding compliance.

Our practice is influenced by respectful and nonviolent communication: observing before judging, helping children name emotions and needs, setting limits without humiliation, offering real choices when choices are available, and supporting repair after conflict. We treat behavior as communication without pretending that every behavior is safe or acceptable. Boundaries remain clear. The distinction is that safety does not require withdrawing dignity. We can stop a harmful action while remaining curious about the need beneath it, and we can guide children toward responsibility without making shame the price of belonging.

Children run to us because they know we respect them wholeheartedly. They know they will not have to become smaller, quieter, easier, or more typical before they are welcomed. This trust is not sentimental; it is instructional. A child who trusts the adult can accept support, attempt a difficult task, recover from conflict, and return after disappointment. A child who feels watched primarily for misbehavior may protect themselves through withdrawal, compliance, or escalation. Our first responsibility is to become adults with whom honest participation is safe.

Neurodivergence Is Part of the Design, Not an Accommodation Added Later

Neurodivergent children and parents have shaped my career, my closest relationships, and my understanding of what inclusion asks of us. There is an immediate camaraderie among families who know what it feels like to enter a space already preparing to explain, apologize, translate, or leave. Neurodivergent families often prepare extensively for environments that have made very little preparation for them. They bring headphones, comfort objects, safe foods, backup clothing, visual plans, scripts, and exit strategies, all while carrying the awareness that access may depend on a child’s ability to tolerate an environment that does not tolerate the child’s needs.

Federal research confirms that disability-related access barriers are not marginal. The Government Accountability Office estimated that 2.2 million children age five and younger and three million parents of young children have a reported disability. Families described difficulty finding programs equipped to serve them, exclusion from participation, and communication barriers, while providers identified staffing and funding constraints (U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2024). Although disability and neurodivergence are not interchangeable terms, these findings reinforce what families tell us directly: nominal availability is not the same as meaningful inclusion.

Bloom does not aspire to create a typical environment with a special corner for children who are seen differently. We seek to build a responsive environment in which human variation is expected from the beginning. Movement, quiet, sensory exploration, deep interests, alternative communication, changing energy, and the need to enter an experience gradually are not disruptions to the model. They helped create it. Children of different ages and abilities can thrive together when educators understand development, protect dignity, and offer varied ways to engage without lowering the richness of what is offered.

Art, Science, Nature, and the Freedom to Investigate

Bloom’s commitment to freedom does not mean leaving children without guidance. It means preparing an environment rich enough to sustain real investigation and then helping each child find a way inside it. Art, science, literature, history, nature, movement, and sensory experience are not separate departments in a child’s mind. A child studying a monarch may count and compare, sketch wing patterns, ask about migration, invent a story, search for milkweed, wonder about weather, and leave carrying native seeds. The experience is scientific, artistic, mathematical, ecological, emotional, and communal at once.

Research on arts participation supports this integrated approach. A National Endowment for the Arts analysis of three longitudinal federal datasets found positive relationships between childhood arts participation and social-emotional attributes as well as academic outcomes, while also documenting unequal access to arts education (National Endowment for the Arts, 2025). These findings do not mean every painting activity produces a guaranteed outcome. They strengthen the case for making sustained, meaningful arts experiences part of children’s ordinary lives rather than treating art as an occasional decoration around more serious learning.

Science begins in the same spirit. Young children investigate long before they learn the formal language of a discipline. Water running through a tube, a seed splitting open, a shadow changing across the floor, or mineral residue appearing as water evaporates can become the beginning of sustained reasoning when an educator prepares materials, focuses observation without dictating the answer, and gives children time to talk about what they notice. This approach is consistent with professional guidance that recognizes children’s capacity for conceptual learning and inquiry through everyday experience (National Science Teaching Association, 2014).

Nature gives these investigations scale and consequence. A systematic review of 296 studies found the strongest evidence connecting children’s nature contact with physical activity and cognitive, behavioral, or mental health outcomes, while also cautioning that much of the literature was cross-sectional and heterogeneous (Fyfe-Johnson et al., 2021). That balance matters to us. We do not need to exaggerate nature into a cure to understand its value. Children deserve regular contact with living systems, weather, soil, water, plants, and other species because these relationships widen attention and make stewardship personal.

Growing Beside Murrieta Hot Springs Resort

Bloom Family Studios did not emerge because Murrieta Hot Springs Resort had failed to welcome families. It emerged because the resort was already building a broader understanding of wellness and community and was willing to trust that children and families could become an even more meaningful part of that vision. The resort first entrusted Together We Bloom with Gather & Grow Mondays. As we built a community of families around art, nature, learning, and connection, the resort’s own public community life continued to expand. Families began discovering Silent Book Club at Brew 1902, live jazz at Guenther’s Lounge, art fairs, wellness markets, food-truck festivals, and new spaces throughout the property.

We grew beside one another. Together We Bloom brought families into the property, and the resort continued giving those families more ways to belong there. The trust that made Bloom Family Studios possible reflects the community Murrieta Hot Springs Resort has intentionally created. We are deeply proud that the resort entrusted us with this next step. It did not simply give us a room. It gave us an opportunity to explore what family-inclusive wellness could become.

This partnership allows us to hold an important truth: members of one family may need different forms of restoration at the same time. A caregiver may need stillness, soaking, exercise, focused work, conversation, or less sensory input. A child may need movement, storytelling, experimentation, relationship, and more input. Neither need is excessive. Neither person should have to disappear for the other to receive care. Bloom creates a parallel experience in which the adult and child can each be meaningfully supported and later reunite with more capacity for one another.

The Resort as a Living Laboratory

A child may not experience Murrieta Hot Springs in the same way as an adult, but that does not make the child’s experience less rich. The property can become a living laboratory in which geothermal water, mineral deposits, temperature, plant life, pollinators, architecture, music, visual art, and historical photographs open pathways into serious inquiry. Children can create maps, measure and compare, study structures, document questions, write stories inspired by the property, draw patterns they observe, and consider what it means to care for a place that will exist beyond their visit. This is not generic programming transferred into a children’s room. It is place-based education: learning made more meaningful because it could only happen here.

Our homeschool and supplemental curricula will become an important way of opening that richness to resort guests and the surrounding community. The goal is not to reproduce school inside Building 33. It is to connect academic disciplines with the places children are already touching, seeing, and wondering about. Literacy lives in maps, oral histories, field notes, labels, and stories. Mathematics lives in architecture, pattern, temperature, time, and measurement. Science lives in the water and soil. Art helps children notice more closely and interpret what cannot be reduced to data. History asks whose experiences have been preserved, whose have been overlooked, and what responsibilities come with telling a place’s story.

Beginning the History Before the Buildings

The history of Murrieta Hot Springs does not begin with the buildings we now recognize or with the Guenther family’s development of the resort. The City of Murrieta’s cultural resources documentation states that the mineral-rich springs have been used by people for thousands of years and records the Luiseño name Churuukunuknu Haki’wuna, noting extensive Indigenous use reflected in nearby habitation sites and artifacts (City of Murrieta, 2011). That history must be approached as living Indigenous history, not as a picturesque preface to a more important commercial era.

The later resort history is also rich. The resort’s historical account notes that Juan Murrieta and his partners purchased land in the region in 1873 and that German immigrant Fritz Guenther acquired land surrounding the springs in 1902 with the vision of creating a health-spa destination (Murrieta Hot Springs Resort, n.d.). The Guenther era shaped buildings, hospitality traditions, gardens, music, and generations of community memory. Bloom can help children encounter this layered past while refusing the common habit of allowing written history to begin only when land enters private ownership.

The land on which we teach is sacred, and we take that responsibility seriously. A land acknowledgment alone is not enough. As Bloom develops curriculum, we must distinguish documented history from legend, avoid speaking of Indigenous people only in the past tense, and seek appropriate relationship and guidance regarding the names, stories, and knowledge we share. We are not the beginning of this place. We are temporary caretakers, and our educational responsibility is to help children approach the land with curiosity, humility, gratitude, and a desire to protect what they are learning to love.

Water, Healing, and Scientific Humility

For generations, people have come to thermal springs describing experiences of healing, relief, and restoration. The current resort centers geothermal water within its wellness identity and describes water rising from hundreds of feet below the surface while gathering minerals from the local geology (Murrieta Hot Springs Resort, n.d.). This creates extraordinary opportunities for science education, but it also creates an obligation to use language carefully. Historical belief, traditional knowledge, personal experience, marketing language, and clinical evidence are not identical forms of knowledge, and children are capable of learning the difference.

Contemporary research on balneotherapy, the therapeutic use of mineral and thermal water, has identified promising but still limited evidence for managing signs and symptoms associated with certain dermatological conditions. Reviews also note variation in water composition, treatment protocols, methodological quality, and the conditions examined (Protano et al., 2024). Bloom does not need to teach that the water cures people. We can ask more interesting questions: Where does geothermal water come from? Why are different pools different temperatures? Which minerals are present? How has water shaped settlement and hospitality? Why have people across cultures and generations sought these springs? What is the difference between a story of healing and evidence for a particular medical claim?

Scientific humility does not diminish wonder. It protects wonder from becoming misinformation. When children learn to hold history, lived experience, cultural knowledge, and scientific investigation in thoughtful relationship, they are learning something larger than a fact about water. They are learning how responsible communities come to know a place.

A Home Base for Family Life

Five years from now, I dream of Bloom as a community hub for health, wellness, education, art, and rich family life: a home base families can return to through changing seasons and changing needs. I imagine spaces for movement and spaces for stillness; spaces for children, caregivers, educators, artists, healers, elders, and community partners; spaces for individualized learning and joyful gathering. I imagine homeschool and supplemental curricula connecting children meaningfully with the history, science, ecology, architecture, and artistic life of Murrieta Hot Springs. I imagine local families, resort members, traveling families, and community partners meeting one another through experiences that feel intentional rather than transactional.

I also imagine a place where families can ask for help without proving that their need is large enough, regular enough, or conventional enough to deserve a response. A family may come to us for one afternoon and return months later. Another may build Bloom into the rhythm of each week. A child may first arrive uncertain and later run toward us before the car door has fully closed. Success will not be measured only in hours booked or programs delivered, although financial sustainability matters if the dream is to endure. It will also be visible in whether parents can exhale without guilt, whether children feel listened to without having to earn our interest, and whether community members begin to see family wellness as something larger than keeping everyone in the same place.

The dream is not simply to operate a successful program. It is to build an ecosystem of belonging. We want children to remember that there was a place where adults found their ideas genuinely fascinating. We want caregivers to remember that there was a place where their own needs did not make them selfish and their children’s needs did not make them unwelcome. We want the community to remember what became possible when a resort, a learning organization, educators, artists, families, and children trusted one another enough to grow something new.

Conclusion

Bloom Family Studios is still becoming. Its form will be refined through licensing, partnership, evaluation, family feedback, community relationship, and the children who reveal possibilities we have not yet imagined. Yet its foundation is already clear. Families are not problems to schedule. Children are not interruptions to adult wellness. Educators are not interchangeable supervisors. Learning is not confined to classrooms, and care is not measured only by whether everyone remained physically safe until pickup.

We are creating a space where different needs can exist without canceling one another, where flexibility is held inside relationship, and where art, science, history, nature, and play become languages of belonging. We are creating family rather than classrooms: not by pretending professional practice does not matter, but by bringing our deepest professional knowledge into a place that feels warm, human, and wholehearted. Bloom matters because children know when they are respected. Families know when they are being held rather than managed. Communities know when they have been invited to participate rather than simply purchase.

Our hope is that every person who enters Bloom Family Studios encounters the same underlying message: you do not need to become less complicated before you can belong here. Your needs can be different from the people you love, and there can still be room for all of you. On land shaped by ancient waters and generations of human relationship, we have been trusted with the opportunity to build that room. We intend to honor that trust with care.

References

Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. (n.d.). Serve and return. https://developingchild.harvard.edu/key-concept/serve-and-return/

City of Murrieta. (2011). Murrieta General Plan 2035 environmental impact report: Cultural resources. https://www.murrietaca.gov/DocumentCenter/View/754/05-09---Cultural-Resources-PDF

Fyfe-Johnson, A. L., Hazlehurst, M. F., Perrins, S. P., Bratman, G. N., Thomas, R., Garrett, K. A., Hafferty, K. R., Cullaz, T. M., Marcuse, E. K., & Tandon, P. S. (2021). Nature and children’s health: A systematic review. Pediatrics, 148(4), e2020049155. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2020-049155

Murrieta Hot Springs Resort. (n.d.). Murrieta Hot Springs history. https://www.murrieta-hotsprings.com/stay/history/

National Association for the Education of Young Children. (2020). Developmentally appropriate practice: A position statement. https://www.naeyc.org/resources/position-statements/dap/contents

National Association for the Education of Young Children. (n.d.). Engaging in reciprocal partnerships with families and fostering community connections. https://www.naeyc.org/resources/position-statements/dap/engaging-families

National Endowment for the Arts. (2025). Snapshots of arts education in childhood and adolescence: Access and outcomes. https://www.arts.gov/impact/research/publications/snapshots-arts-education-childhood-and-adolescence

National Science Teaching Association. (2014). Early childhood science education. https://www.nsta.org/nstas-official-positions/early-childhood-science-education

Protano, C., Vitali, M., De Giorgi, A., Marotta, D., Crucianelli, S., & Fontana, M. (2024). Balneotherapy using thermal mineral water baths and dermatological diseases: A systematic review. International Journal of Biometeorology, 68, 1005–1013. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00484-024-02649-x

U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. (2025). Childcare workers. Occupational Outlook Handbook. https://www.bls.gov/ooh/personal-care-and-service/childcare-workers.htm

U.S. Department of the Treasury. (2021). The economics of child care supply in the United States. https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/The-Economics-of-Childcare-Supply-09-14-final.pdf

U.S. Government Accountability Office. (2024). Child care accessibility: Agencies can further coordinate to better serve families with disabilities (GAO-24-106843). https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-24-106843

Yogman, M., Garner, A., Hutchinson, J., Hirsh-Pasek, K., & Golinkoff, R. M. (2018). The power of play: A pediatric role in enhancing development in young children. Pediatrics, 142(3), e20182058. https://doi.org/10.1542/peds.2018-2058