Ecological nutrients names a simple analogy: a person’s makeup has developmental requirements the way a body has nutritional ones. Everyone shares universal needs, but a particular architecture may have an unusually high demand for a particular input — horizon, signal, recognition, materials, responsibility, solitude, challenge.
Why they are easy to miss
A nutrient can be abundant in the wider society and still absent from one person’s local ecology. The result is a starvation that doesn’t look like deprivation: the child has food, love, and schooling, but the one input their architecture most needs is simply not present. It surfaces only indirectly, as behavior that gets misread as a flaw.
The three questions
Supplying a nutrient means clearing three hurdles in order of difficulty — does the ecology contain it, can the participant reach it, and does anyone recognize that they need it? The last is hardest: a child starved of a nutrient often has no concept of what is missing. See Sealed Capacities.