Course: Early Childhood Education"Waldorf Education is not a pedagogical system but an art - the art of awakening what is actually there within the human being." ~ Rudolf Steiner
The Waldorf early childhood educator works with the young child by creating a warm, beautiful and loving home-like environment, which is protective and secure, and where things happen in a predictable, rhythmic manner. Here she responds to the developing child in two basic ways: First, she engages in domestic, practical, and artistic activities the children can readily imitate (for example, baking, painting, gardening, and handicrafts), adapting the work to the changing seasons and festivals of the year. Secondly, the Waldorf kindergarten teacher nurtures the children’s power of imagination by telling carefully selected stories and by encouraging free play. This free or fantasy play, in which children act out scenarios of their own creation, helps them to experience many aspects of life more deeply. When toys are used, they are made of natural materials. Wood, cotton, wool, silk, shells, stones, pine cones and objects from nature that the children themselves have collected are used in play and to beautify the room. Sensory integration, eye-hand coordination, appreciating the beauty of language, sequencing, and other basic skills necessary for the foundation of academic learning are fostered in the kindergarten. In this truly loving, natural and creative environment, children are provided with a range of activities to prepare them for later learning and for life itself. |
Course Outline
Early Childhood Education 1
Lesson 1: You Are Your Child's First Teacher Lesson 2: Home Life as the Basis for All Learning Lesson 3: Birth to Three: Growing Down and Waking Up Lesson 4: Helping Your Baby's Development Lesson 5: Helping Your Toddler's Development Lesson 6: Rhythm in Home Life Lesson 7: Discipline and Other Parenting Issues Lesson 8: Reflection and Final Paper/Early Childhood Education 1 Early Childhood Education 2
Lesson 1: Nourishing Your Child's Imagination and Creative Play Lesson 2: Developing Your Child's Artistic Ability Lesson 3: Encouraging your Child's Musical Ability Lesson 4: Cognitive Development and Early Childhood Education Lesson 5: Common Parenting Question: From Television to Immunizations Lesson 6: Help for the Journey Lesson 7: Reflection and Final Paper/Early Childhood Education 2 
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What Makes Waldorf Early Childhood Education “Waldorf”?
Is there a Waldorf early childhood curriculum? Are there specific activities—puppet plays, circle games, watercolor painting, for example—that are essential to a Waldorf program? Are there certain materials and furnishings—lazured, soft-colored walls, handmade dolls, beeswax crayons, silk and other natural materials—that are necessary ingredients in a Waldorf setting? What makes Waldorf early childhood education “Waldorf”?
Rudolf Steiner spoke on a number of occasions about the experiences that are essential for the healthy development of the young child. These include:
• love and warmth
• an environment that nourishes the senses
• creative and artistic experiences
• meaningful adult activity to be imitated
• free, imaginative play
• protection of the forces of childhood
• gratitude, reverence, and wonder
• joy, humor, and happiness
• adult caregivers pursuing a path of inner development
Love and Warmth
Children who live in an atmosphere of love and warmth, and who have around them truly good examples to imitate, are living in their proper element. —Rudolf Steiner, The Education of the Child
Love and emotional warmth, rather than any particular early childhood program, create the basis for the child’s healthy development. These qualities should live between the adult caregiver and the child, in the children’s behavior toward one another, and among the adults in the early childhood center. When Rudolf Steiner visited the classes of the first Waldorf school, he often asked the children, “Do you love your teacher?” Children are also served if this love and warmth exist in the relationships between the teachers and the parents, between the early childhood teachers and the rest of the school, and in the surrounding community.
An Environment that Nourishes the Senses
The essential task of the kindergarten teacher is to create the proper physical environment around the children. “Physical environment” must be understood in the widest sense imaginable. It includes not just what happens around the children in the material sense, but everything that occurs in their environment, everything that can be perceived by their senses, that can work on the inner powers of the children from the surrounding physical space. —Rudolf Steiner, The Education of the Child
Early learning is profoundly connected to the child’s own physical body and sensory experience. Everything the young child sees, hears, and touches has an effect. Thus a clean, orderly, beautiful, quiet setting is essential. The physical environment, both indoors and outdoors, should provide varied and nourishing opportunities for self-education—experiences in touch, balance, lively and joyful movement, and also inward listening. The children should experience large-group, small-group, and solitary activities. The teacher, in integrating diverse elements into a harmonious and meaningful environment, provides surroundings that are accessible to the child’s understanding, feeling, and active will. The care, love, and intention expressed through the outer materials and furnishings of the classes are experienced unconsciously by the child. The child experiences the immediate environment as ensouled and nurturing. The adult shapes the temporal environment as well as the spatial. Through a rhythmic schedule, in which the same thing happens at the same time on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, the child gains a sense of security and confidence in the world. Also, the different activities of the day should take place in a comfortable flow with smooth transitions.
Creative, Artistic Experience
In order to become true educators, we must be able to see the truly aesthetic element in the work, to bring an artistic quality into our tasks. . . . [I]f we bring this aesthetic element, then we begin to come closer to what the child wills out of its own nature. —Rudolf Steiner, A Modern Art of Education
In the early childhood class, the art of education is the art of living. The teacher is an artist in how she perceives and relates to the children and to the activities of daily life. She orchestrates and choreographs the rhythms of each day, each week, and each season in such a way that the children can breathe freely in a living structure. In addition, the teacher offers the children opportunities for artistic experiences in singing and music, in movement and gesture—through eurythmy and rhythmic games—and in creative speech and language—through verses, poetry, and stories. The children model with beeswax, draw, and do watercolor painting. Puppet and marionette shows put on by the teacher are an important element in the life of the kindergarten.
Meaningful Adult Activity as Examples for the Child’s Imitation
The task of the kindergarten teacher is to adapt the practical activities of daily life so that they are suitable for the child’s imitation through play. . . . The activities of children in kindergarten must be derived directly from life itself rather than being “thought out” by the intellectualized culture of adults. In the kindergarten, the most important thing is to give children the opportunity to directly imitate life itself. —Rudolf Steiner, The Child’s Changing Consciousness
Children do not learn through instruction or admonition but though imitation. Good sight will develop if the environment has the proper conditions of light and color, while in the brain and blood circulation, the physical foundations will be laid for a healthy sense of morality if children witness moral actions in their surroundings. —Rudolf Steiner, The Education of the Child
Real, meaningful work with a purpose, adjusted to the needs of the child, is in accordance with the child’s natural and inborn need for movement, and is an enormously significant educational activity. The teacher focuses on the meaningful activities that nurture life in the in the classroom “home,” such as cooking and baking, gardening, doing laundry and cleaning, creating and caring for the materials in the immediate environment, and taking care of the bodily needs of the children. This directed attention of the teacher creates an atmosphere of freedom in which the individuality of each child can be active. It is not intended just that the children copy the outer movements and actions of the adult, but that they experience also the inner attitude—the devotion, care, sense of purpose, focus, and creative spirit of the adult.
Free, Imaginative Play
In the child’s play activity, we can only provide the conditions for education. What is gained through play, through everything that cannot be determined by fixed rules, stems fundamentally from the self-activity of the child, The real educational value of play lives in the fact that we ignore our rules and regulations, our educational theory, and allow the child free rein. —Rudolf Steiner, Self Education in the Light of Anthroposophy
In a seemingly contradictory indication, Rudolf Steiner also said: Giving direction and guidance to play is one of the essential tasks of sensible education, which is to say an art of education that is right for humanity. . . . The early childhood educator must school her observation in order to develop an artistic eye, to detect the individual quality of each child’s play. —Rudolf Steiner, Lecture of February 24, 1921 in Utrecht, The Netherlands
Little children learn through play. They approach play in an entirely individual way, out of their entirely individual ways, out of their unique configuration of soul and spirit, and out of their unique experiences of the world in which they live. The manner in which a child plays may offer a picture of how he will take up his destiny as an adult. The task of the teacher is to create an environment that supports the possibility of healthy play. This environment includes the physical surroundings, furnishings, and play materials; the social environment of activities and social interactions; and the inner/spiritual environment of thoughts, intentions, and imaginations held by the adults.
Protection for the Forces of Childhood
Although it is highly necessary that each person should be fully awake in later life, the child must be allowed to remain as long as possible in the peaceful, dreamlike condition of pictorial imagination in which his early years of life are passed. For if we allow his organism to grow strong in this nonintellectual way, he will rightly develop in later life the intellectuality needed in the world today. —Rudolf Steiner, A Modern Art of Education
The lively, waking dream of the little child’s consciousness must be allowed to thrive in the early childhood group. This means that the teacher refrains as much as possible from verbal instruction. Instead, her gestures and actions provide a model for the child’s imitation. Familiar daily rhythms and activities provide a context where the need for verbal instruction is reduced. Simple, archetypal imagery in stories, songs, and games provides experiences that the children can internalize but that do not require intellectual or critical reflection or explanation.
An Atmosphere of Gratitude, Reverence, and Wonder
An atmosphere of gratitude should grow naturally in children through merely witnessing the gratitude the adults feel as they receive what is freely given by others, and in how they express this gratitude. If a child says “thank you” very naturally—not in response to the urging of others, but simply through imitating— something has been done that will greatly benefit the child’s whole life. Out of this an all-embracing gratitude will develop toward the whole world. This cultivation of gratitude is of paramount importance. —Rudolf Steiner, The Child’s Changing Consciousness
Out of these early, all-pervading experiences of gratitude, the first tender capacity for love, which is deeply embedded in each and every child, begins to sprout in earthly life.
If, during the first period of life, we create an atmosphere of gratitude around the children, then out of this gratitude toward the world, toward the entire universe, and also out of thankfulness for being able to be in this world, a profound and warm sense of devotion will arise . . . upright, honest, and true. —Rudolf Steiner, The Child’s Changing Consciousness
This is the basis for what will become a capacity for deep, intimate love and commitment in later life, for dedication and loyalty, for true admiration of others, for fervent spiritual or religious devotion, and for placing oneself wholeheartedly in the service of the world.
Joy, Humor, and Happiness
The joy of children in and with their environment must therefore be counted among the forces that build and shape the physical organs. They need teachers who look and act with happiness and, most of all, with honest, unaffected love. Such a love that streams, as it were, with warmth through the physical environment of the children may be said to literally “hatch out” the forms of the physical organs. —Rudolf Steiner, The Education of the Child
If you make a surly face so that a child gets the impression you are a grumpy person, this harms the child for the rest of his life. What kind of school plan you make is neither here nor there; what matters is what sort of person you are. —Rudolf Steiner The Kingdom of Childhood
The teacher’s earnestness about her work and her serious striving must be balanced with humor and a demeanor that bespeaks happiness. There must be moments of humor and delight in the classroom every day.
Adult Caregivers on a Path of Inner Development
For the small child before the change of teeth, the most important thing in education is the teacher’s own being. —Rudolf Steiner, Essentials of Education
Just think what feelings arise in the soul of the early childhood educator who realizes: What I accomplish with this child, I accomplish for the grown-up person in his twenties. What matters is not so much a knowledge of abstract educational principles or pedagogical rules. . . . [W]hat does matter is that a deep sense of responsibility develops in [the teacher’s heart and mind] and that this affects her or his worldview and the way she or he stands in life. —Rudolf Steiner, Education in the Face of the Present-Day World Situation, Lecture of June 10, 1920
Here we come to the spiritual environment of the early childhood setting: the thoughts, attitudes, and imaginations living in the adult who cares for the children. This invisible realm that lies behind the outer actions of the teacher has a profound influence on the child’s development. The spiritual environment includes recognition of the child as a threefold being—of body, soul, and spirit—on a path of evolutionary development through repeated Earth lives. This recognition provides a foundation for the daily activities in the kindergarten, and for the relationship between adult and child. Such an understanding of the nature and destiny of the human comes out of the inner life of the adult, the life of the individual Ego. This is a realm that is largely hidden, and hence is difficult to observe directly and to evaluate objectively. Yet ultimately this realm may affect the development of the children most profoundly. It is not merely our outer activity that influence the growing child. What lies behind and is expressed through this outer activity also is crucial. Ultimately, the most profound influence on the child is who we are as human beings—and who we are becoming and how.
Conclusion
The “essentials” described here are qualitative in nature. For the most part, they are not part of a body of concrete “best practices.” Instead, they concern inner qualities and attributes of the teacher that foster healthy development in young children. These qualities can come to expression in a wide variety of ways, according to
• the age range of the children in the group and their individual characteristics;
• the nature of the particular program—a kindergarten, playgroup, or extended care program; and
• the environment and surroundings—urban or rural, home or school or child care center.
Many practices that have come to be associated with Waldorf/Steiner early childhood education—certain daily rhythms and rituals, play materials, songs, stories, even the colors of the walls, the dress of the adults, and the menu for snack—may be mistakenly taken as essentials. The results of such assumptions can be surprising, even disturbing—a “King Winter” nature table appearing in a tropical climate in “wintertime,” or dolls with pink skin and yellow hair in a kindergarten where all the children are brown-skinned and black-haired. Such practices may express a tendency toward a doctrinal or dogmatic approach that is out of touch with the realities of the immediate situation and instead imposes something from “outside.” There is a parallel concern at the other end of the spectrum from the doctrinal or dogmatic. The freedom that Waldorf Education offers each individual teacher to determine the practices of her early childhood program can be misinterpreted to mean that “anything goes,” according to personal preference and style. Here too, there is the danger that the developmental realities and needs of the children are not sufficiently taken into consideration. Each of these one-sided approaches may be injurious to the development of the children. As Waldorf early childhood educators, we are constantly seeking a middle, universally human path between polarities. Rudolf Steiner’s advice to the first Waldorf kindergarten teacher, Elizabeth Grunelius, in the early 1920s, can be paraphrased as follows: "Observe the children. Actively meditate. Follow your intuitions. Work so that all your actions are worthy of imitation." Today, those of us who work with young children in a Waldorf environment are challenged to engage in a constant process of renewal. We must actively observe the children in our care, carry them in our meditations, and seek to work consciously and artistically to create the experiences that will serve their development. Our devotion to this task awakens us to the importance of self-education and transformation in the context of community. Our ongoing study of child and human development, our own artistic and meditative practices, and our work with Anthroposophy, independently and together with others, become essential elements for the practice of Waldorf early childhood education. Here we can come to experience that we are not alone on this journey. We are supported through our encounters with one another other and with our sharing of insights, experience, and knowledge. We are helped also by those beings spiritual beings who are committed to our continued development and to the renewal of culture that Waldorf Education seeks to serve.
Rudolf Steiner spoke on a number of occasions about the experiences that are essential for the healthy development of the young child. These include:
• love and warmth
• an environment that nourishes the senses
• creative and artistic experiences
• meaningful adult activity to be imitated
• free, imaginative play
• protection of the forces of childhood
• gratitude, reverence, and wonder
• joy, humor, and happiness
• adult caregivers pursuing a path of inner development
Love and Warmth
Children who live in an atmosphere of love and warmth, and who have around them truly good examples to imitate, are living in their proper element. —Rudolf Steiner, The Education of the Child
Love and emotional warmth, rather than any particular early childhood program, create the basis for the child’s healthy development. These qualities should live between the adult caregiver and the child, in the children’s behavior toward one another, and among the adults in the early childhood center. When Rudolf Steiner visited the classes of the first Waldorf school, he often asked the children, “Do you love your teacher?” Children are also served if this love and warmth exist in the relationships between the teachers and the parents, between the early childhood teachers and the rest of the school, and in the surrounding community.
An Environment that Nourishes the Senses
The essential task of the kindergarten teacher is to create the proper physical environment around the children. “Physical environment” must be understood in the widest sense imaginable. It includes not just what happens around the children in the material sense, but everything that occurs in their environment, everything that can be perceived by their senses, that can work on the inner powers of the children from the surrounding physical space. —Rudolf Steiner, The Education of the Child
Early learning is profoundly connected to the child’s own physical body and sensory experience. Everything the young child sees, hears, and touches has an effect. Thus a clean, orderly, beautiful, quiet setting is essential. The physical environment, both indoors and outdoors, should provide varied and nourishing opportunities for self-education—experiences in touch, balance, lively and joyful movement, and also inward listening. The children should experience large-group, small-group, and solitary activities. The teacher, in integrating diverse elements into a harmonious and meaningful environment, provides surroundings that are accessible to the child’s understanding, feeling, and active will. The care, love, and intention expressed through the outer materials and furnishings of the classes are experienced unconsciously by the child. The child experiences the immediate environment as ensouled and nurturing. The adult shapes the temporal environment as well as the spatial. Through a rhythmic schedule, in which the same thing happens at the same time on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis, the child gains a sense of security and confidence in the world. Also, the different activities of the day should take place in a comfortable flow with smooth transitions.
Creative, Artistic Experience
In order to become true educators, we must be able to see the truly aesthetic element in the work, to bring an artistic quality into our tasks. . . . [I]f we bring this aesthetic element, then we begin to come closer to what the child wills out of its own nature. —Rudolf Steiner, A Modern Art of Education
In the early childhood class, the art of education is the art of living. The teacher is an artist in how she perceives and relates to the children and to the activities of daily life. She orchestrates and choreographs the rhythms of each day, each week, and each season in such a way that the children can breathe freely in a living structure. In addition, the teacher offers the children opportunities for artistic experiences in singing and music, in movement and gesture—through eurythmy and rhythmic games—and in creative speech and language—through verses, poetry, and stories. The children model with beeswax, draw, and do watercolor painting. Puppet and marionette shows put on by the teacher are an important element in the life of the kindergarten.
Meaningful Adult Activity as Examples for the Child’s Imitation
The task of the kindergarten teacher is to adapt the practical activities of daily life so that they are suitable for the child’s imitation through play. . . . The activities of children in kindergarten must be derived directly from life itself rather than being “thought out” by the intellectualized culture of adults. In the kindergarten, the most important thing is to give children the opportunity to directly imitate life itself. —Rudolf Steiner, The Child’s Changing Consciousness
Children do not learn through instruction or admonition but though imitation. Good sight will develop if the environment has the proper conditions of light and color, while in the brain and blood circulation, the physical foundations will be laid for a healthy sense of morality if children witness moral actions in their surroundings. —Rudolf Steiner, The Education of the Child
Real, meaningful work with a purpose, adjusted to the needs of the child, is in accordance with the child’s natural and inborn need for movement, and is an enormously significant educational activity. The teacher focuses on the meaningful activities that nurture life in the in the classroom “home,” such as cooking and baking, gardening, doing laundry and cleaning, creating and caring for the materials in the immediate environment, and taking care of the bodily needs of the children. This directed attention of the teacher creates an atmosphere of freedom in which the individuality of each child can be active. It is not intended just that the children copy the outer movements and actions of the adult, but that they experience also the inner attitude—the devotion, care, sense of purpose, focus, and creative spirit of the adult.
Free, Imaginative Play
In the child’s play activity, we can only provide the conditions for education. What is gained through play, through everything that cannot be determined by fixed rules, stems fundamentally from the self-activity of the child, The real educational value of play lives in the fact that we ignore our rules and regulations, our educational theory, and allow the child free rein. —Rudolf Steiner, Self Education in the Light of Anthroposophy
In a seemingly contradictory indication, Rudolf Steiner also said: Giving direction and guidance to play is one of the essential tasks of sensible education, which is to say an art of education that is right for humanity. . . . The early childhood educator must school her observation in order to develop an artistic eye, to detect the individual quality of each child’s play. —Rudolf Steiner, Lecture of February 24, 1921 in Utrecht, The Netherlands
Little children learn through play. They approach play in an entirely individual way, out of their entirely individual ways, out of their unique configuration of soul and spirit, and out of their unique experiences of the world in which they live. The manner in which a child plays may offer a picture of how he will take up his destiny as an adult. The task of the teacher is to create an environment that supports the possibility of healthy play. This environment includes the physical surroundings, furnishings, and play materials; the social environment of activities and social interactions; and the inner/spiritual environment of thoughts, intentions, and imaginations held by the adults.
Protection for the Forces of Childhood
Although it is highly necessary that each person should be fully awake in later life, the child must be allowed to remain as long as possible in the peaceful, dreamlike condition of pictorial imagination in which his early years of life are passed. For if we allow his organism to grow strong in this nonintellectual way, he will rightly develop in later life the intellectuality needed in the world today. —Rudolf Steiner, A Modern Art of Education
The lively, waking dream of the little child’s consciousness must be allowed to thrive in the early childhood group. This means that the teacher refrains as much as possible from verbal instruction. Instead, her gestures and actions provide a model for the child’s imitation. Familiar daily rhythms and activities provide a context where the need for verbal instruction is reduced. Simple, archetypal imagery in stories, songs, and games provides experiences that the children can internalize but that do not require intellectual or critical reflection or explanation.
An Atmosphere of Gratitude, Reverence, and Wonder
An atmosphere of gratitude should grow naturally in children through merely witnessing the gratitude the adults feel as they receive what is freely given by others, and in how they express this gratitude. If a child says “thank you” very naturally—not in response to the urging of others, but simply through imitating— something has been done that will greatly benefit the child’s whole life. Out of this an all-embracing gratitude will develop toward the whole world. This cultivation of gratitude is of paramount importance. —Rudolf Steiner, The Child’s Changing Consciousness
Out of these early, all-pervading experiences of gratitude, the first tender capacity for love, which is deeply embedded in each and every child, begins to sprout in earthly life.
If, during the first period of life, we create an atmosphere of gratitude around the children, then out of this gratitude toward the world, toward the entire universe, and also out of thankfulness for being able to be in this world, a profound and warm sense of devotion will arise . . . upright, honest, and true. —Rudolf Steiner, The Child’s Changing Consciousness
This is the basis for what will become a capacity for deep, intimate love and commitment in later life, for dedication and loyalty, for true admiration of others, for fervent spiritual or religious devotion, and for placing oneself wholeheartedly in the service of the world.
Joy, Humor, and Happiness
The joy of children in and with their environment must therefore be counted among the forces that build and shape the physical organs. They need teachers who look and act with happiness and, most of all, with honest, unaffected love. Such a love that streams, as it were, with warmth through the physical environment of the children may be said to literally “hatch out” the forms of the physical organs. —Rudolf Steiner, The Education of the Child
If you make a surly face so that a child gets the impression you are a grumpy person, this harms the child for the rest of his life. What kind of school plan you make is neither here nor there; what matters is what sort of person you are. —Rudolf Steiner The Kingdom of Childhood
The teacher’s earnestness about her work and her serious striving must be balanced with humor and a demeanor that bespeaks happiness. There must be moments of humor and delight in the classroom every day.
Adult Caregivers on a Path of Inner Development
For the small child before the change of teeth, the most important thing in education is the teacher’s own being. —Rudolf Steiner, Essentials of Education
Just think what feelings arise in the soul of the early childhood educator who realizes: What I accomplish with this child, I accomplish for the grown-up person in his twenties. What matters is not so much a knowledge of abstract educational principles or pedagogical rules. . . . [W]hat does matter is that a deep sense of responsibility develops in [the teacher’s heart and mind] and that this affects her or his worldview and the way she or he stands in life. —Rudolf Steiner, Education in the Face of the Present-Day World Situation, Lecture of June 10, 1920
Here we come to the spiritual environment of the early childhood setting: the thoughts, attitudes, and imaginations living in the adult who cares for the children. This invisible realm that lies behind the outer actions of the teacher has a profound influence on the child’s development. The spiritual environment includes recognition of the child as a threefold being—of body, soul, and spirit—on a path of evolutionary development through repeated Earth lives. This recognition provides a foundation for the daily activities in the kindergarten, and for the relationship between adult and child. Such an understanding of the nature and destiny of the human comes out of the inner life of the adult, the life of the individual Ego. This is a realm that is largely hidden, and hence is difficult to observe directly and to evaluate objectively. Yet ultimately this realm may affect the development of the children most profoundly. It is not merely our outer activity that influence the growing child. What lies behind and is expressed through this outer activity also is crucial. Ultimately, the most profound influence on the child is who we are as human beings—and who we are becoming and how.
Conclusion
The “essentials” described here are qualitative in nature. For the most part, they are not part of a body of concrete “best practices.” Instead, they concern inner qualities and attributes of the teacher that foster healthy development in young children. These qualities can come to expression in a wide variety of ways, according to
• the age range of the children in the group and their individual characteristics;
• the nature of the particular program—a kindergarten, playgroup, or extended care program; and
• the environment and surroundings—urban or rural, home or school or child care center.
Many practices that have come to be associated with Waldorf/Steiner early childhood education—certain daily rhythms and rituals, play materials, songs, stories, even the colors of the walls, the dress of the adults, and the menu for snack—may be mistakenly taken as essentials. The results of such assumptions can be surprising, even disturbing—a “King Winter” nature table appearing in a tropical climate in “wintertime,” or dolls with pink skin and yellow hair in a kindergarten where all the children are brown-skinned and black-haired. Such practices may express a tendency toward a doctrinal or dogmatic approach that is out of touch with the realities of the immediate situation and instead imposes something from “outside.” There is a parallel concern at the other end of the spectrum from the doctrinal or dogmatic. The freedom that Waldorf Education offers each individual teacher to determine the practices of her early childhood program can be misinterpreted to mean that “anything goes,” according to personal preference and style. Here too, there is the danger that the developmental realities and needs of the children are not sufficiently taken into consideration. Each of these one-sided approaches may be injurious to the development of the children. As Waldorf early childhood educators, we are constantly seeking a middle, universally human path between polarities. Rudolf Steiner’s advice to the first Waldorf kindergarten teacher, Elizabeth Grunelius, in the early 1920s, can be paraphrased as follows: "Observe the children. Actively meditate. Follow your intuitions. Work so that all your actions are worthy of imitation." Today, those of us who work with young children in a Waldorf environment are challenged to engage in a constant process of renewal. We must actively observe the children in our care, carry them in our meditations, and seek to work consciously and artistically to create the experiences that will serve their development. Our devotion to this task awakens us to the importance of self-education and transformation in the context of community. Our ongoing study of child and human development, our own artistic and meditative practices, and our work with Anthroposophy, independently and together with others, become essential elements for the practice of Waldorf early childhood education. Here we can come to experience that we are not alone on this journey. We are supported through our encounters with one another other and with our sharing of insights, experience, and knowledge. We are helped also by those beings spiritual beings who are committed to our continued development and to the renewal of culture that Waldorf Education seeks to serve.
Early Childhood Education 2 - Lesson 5
Tasks and Assignments for Early Childhood Education 2 - Lesson 5
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Please study the study material/chapters indicated below. Feel free to use additional resources as wanted and needed. Once you feel you are sufficiently acquainted with the subject please complete the following:
1. Reflect on your own childhood. What was your exposure to media, computers, television, videos, and similar items? How did this exposure (or lack thereof) influence your development? 2. What is your idea concerning immunizations and childhood illnesses? Has it changed over time? 3. Reflect on your own childhood. What was the role of religion in your upbringing? How did it influence you and your attitudes about life? Submit the completed assignment via the submission form or via email. 
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Study Material for Early Childhood Education 2 - Lesson 5
You Are Your Child's First TeacherCΗΑΡΤΕR 12 - Common Parenting Questions: From Television to Immunizations
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When I speak with parents around the country, similar issues come up again and again as parents consider the approach to the young child suggested in this book. By sharing some of these questions and the reasoning behind my answers, I hope this chapter will spark your own questions and your search for the answers that are most nurturing to you and your family.
Even if I wanted to provide an idyllic world for my young child, I don't think I could do it. Modern life is just too fast-paced and stressful. Besides, don't children need to adjust to the realities of today's world?
The best way to prepare your children for the stresses of today's world is not to expose them to problems early in their life, but to provide them with an environment that is warm and nurturing and that shelters them from as many of the problems of the adult world as possible. Child psychologist David Elkind has discussed at length the difficulties children encounter when they are hurried to grow up and face adult choices too soon, or when they are subjected to miseducation in academic subjects, swimming, gymnastics, ballet, and so forth. (1) Kim John Payne has found similar effects in his counseling practice with children and families and has outlined many practical suggestions in his book Simplicity Parenting.
The rushed lives that most of us live make it difficult to provide children with an ideal world for their early childhood years. We tend to move frequently or travel a lot, to work too much and be too busy, and to move too fast for the tempo of our children. Divorce, single parenting, and blended families all add to the stresses of a child. And, with the best intentions, many parents push their children to achieve at an early age or to be grown-up emotional companions for them.
Yet there is a great deal that parents can do for their children by providing an environment filled with love and warmth. By understanding a young child's development and his complete openness to his surroundings, we can do our best to provide a stable and nurturing environment within our current living situation. Fortunately, children are very giving and forgiving—and fairly resilient.
Now that we have recognized some of the ways in which children differ from adults, how can we let them be children in a society in which changing family, social, and academic pressures make them deal with the adult world earlier than they are ready? Most of us can't radically change our life situations, even if we wanted to. For the most part we are members of our highly technological, urban, material-minded society. Yet no matter where we find ourselves, many ways to meet the real needs of the young child have been suggested in this book. In summary:
Your description of a play-oriented kindergarten leaves me wondering whether it really prepares children for the high-tech world in which we live. What about computer literacy? I want my child to have a competitive edge, not be behind the times.
Every parent should read Jane Healy's extensively researched book Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect Our Children's Minds—for Better and Worse. She reviews numerous studies about what is and isn't working with educational software, both at home and in the schools. She also provides recommendations for evaluating games and educational programs before purchasing them and gives vital guidelines for parents in starting and guiding their child's computer use at home. She also shares her understanding, as a learning specialist and developmental neuropsychologist, of the effects that video games and extensive computer use may be having in actually changing children's "wiring' through hours of rapidly changing visual images. And she makes recommendations for protecting children's health, pointing out that if employers let people use computers under the conditions found in most schools, they would be cited by OSHA. In fact, the American Academy of Pediatrics has expressed concern about how much time children spend in front of various types of screens and recommends that a "media history," including the amount and type of computer, television, and video use, be taken by physicians as a routine part of a child's media record for diagnosis of media-related problems—physical, academic, and emotional. (2)
Precisely because computers are changing our world so rapidly, what children will need most in the future is the ability to think creatively. Most of the jobs that your children will be entering don't even exist today! The qualities that children will need in the future are not technical skills, but mental habits such as analytical thinking and problem solving, the ability to communicate, imagination, values, persistence, creativity, kindness, and tolerance. Todd Oppenheimer reported in his Atlantic Monthly article, "The Computer Delusion," that even high-tech corporations that are seeking creative employees rarely hire people who are primarily computer experts. Rather, they look for innovation, teamwork, flexibility, and innovative thinking, qualities they often find lacking in many "technology nerds." (3)
Children who start to use computers in preschool show no demonstrable advantage over those who start using them at age twelve or fourteen. Computers, as word processors and vehicles for logical thinking through programming, are suited to the adolescent, not the preschool-age child! Computers as toys are inappropriate, because they present a two-dimensional abstraction of the world to the young child, who should be moving and playing and acquiring a broad base of experiences of the physical world and the world of imaginative play. The visual image on the computer screen is especially hard on the developing eyes of the young child.
Because children's senses and brains are developing throughout childhood, Healy says that "age-appropriate computer use may help establish some forms of connections, but inappropriate use may also build resistant habits that interfere with academic learning. Once set into the brain's connectivity, such patterns are hard to break." (4) Parents, like educators in the nation's schools, are jumping on the bandwagon that every child should be computer literate and be on the Internet without sufficiently investigating the nature of brain development, how children learn, and what is necessary for healthy development at various ages.
Most of the educational programs for young children try to teach concepts at too young an age. Remember that the young child needs to be addressed through movement and imitation. Steiner says, "Have we the right to believe that with our intellectual mode of knowledge we can ever participate in the experience of the outer world which a child has, the child who is all sense-organ? This we cannot do It is immensely important that we do not consciously or unconsciously call upon the child's intellect prematurely, as people are so prone to do today." (5)
We need to remember how the fantasy and play of the young child transform into the artistic imagination of the elementary-school child, the questioning of the teenager, and the rational thinking of the young adult. Then we will have confidence that fantasy and imagination, which are so natural for the young child, form a better foundation for later creative thinking than early learning. Creative thinking is more needed in our highly technological world than four-year-olds who can tap the screen of an iPad or manipulate the mouse of a computer.
My five-year-old has always been precocious and already reads. And he can out-reason me in getting what he wants. If we want to try to encourage balanced development, what can we do now? He can't go back to early childhood!
In working toward balanced development, it is necessary to have a picture of your child that includes more than intellectual achievements. What is he like emotionally? Is he happy being a child? Does he relate well with other children, or almost exclusively with adults? What is he like physically? Is he at home in his body and well coordinated? Does he have frequent illnesses and require antibiotics?
Many times early intellectual awakening can result in a weakening of the child's vital forces, manifesting in frequent colds or other illnesses. The dreamy state of early childhood is an essential element in the healthy formation of the physical body during the first seven years. The intellect is crystalline and hardening in its effect. When it is engaged prematurely, it can inhibit the proper development of the physical organs and the unfolding of the fluid emotions. Steiner even relates some illnesses in later life to influences in the first seven years:
Whoever studies the whole course of a man's life from birth to death, bearing in mind the requirements of which I have spoken, will see that a child who has been exposed to things suitable only to grown-up people and who imitates these things will learn in his later years, from the age of about 50, suffer from sclerosis ... Illnesses that appear in later life are often only the result of educational errors made in the very earliest years of childhood. (6)
Because the job of the intellect is to analyze and exercise critical judgment, very bright children tend to have difficulty relating emotionally with other children, a problem that can intensify as the child becomes older.
While an awakened child cannot go back to the dreamy world of early childhood, imaginative play and the arts can have a healing influence on the child's life forces, helping to "reweave the web" that protects the child during the first seven years. Images from fairy tales are also nurturing to the unconscious elements of the young child.
Although you can't go back in time and do things differently with your child, it is also important not to feel guilty about choices you have already made. You were just as good a parent then as you are now. You made the best decisions you could then, based on your knowledge and perceptions of your choices. Guilt only takes us out of the present moment and makes us less able to see what is needed now, thus perpetuating problems rather than leading to meeting the present creatively. If there is going to be the possibility of healing, it must take place in the present. We make the best choices we can for our children in each moment, just as our parents did for us.
Why do you suggest eliminating television for young children? We only let Jessica watch educational programs and she loves them!
Probably anyone who is reading this book is concerned enough about their children's development that they think seriously about television watching and have probably limited it in some ways, to only certain programs, a certain amount of time, or watching programs together and talking about them, for example. However, the problem is twofold. First, television watching, including DVDs, is very seductive, and the time children spend doing it expands the moment your awareness drops. This is because it entertains the child and buys time for you as a parent. Creative play does the same thing, but television watching tends to squelch imagination and free play, leaving only bored children and more need for TV or another movie!
Second, any amount and any kind of screen time—TV, DVD, video game, or computer—is not healthy for the young child, regardless of the content of the program. In 1999 the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended that children under the age of two not watch any television for healthy development. That was done in the face of statistics that show two-year-olds spend an average of twenty-seven hours a week watching television. There has also been recent heavy marketing of television programs designed for toddlers under the age of two. The doctors also recommended that older children not have televisions in their bedrooms.
I was delighted that the pediatricians finally took the most rudimentary stand for child health, developmentally appropriate activities, and brain development with regard to the media. And I was astounded that they took so much criticism for it, from editorials in the New York Times to the Sacramento Bee. The primary criticisms were that their recommendations were dogmatic, unrealistic, and unscientific, because studies of the effects of TV viewing on infants and toddlers haven't been done yet. When the "experts" finally recommend something sensible, society discredits them as "unscientific."
Television is an important source of information and diversion for most adults. But children are not in the same stage of development as adults. The lack of physical movement and the rapidly changing sensory stimulation on the screen make television watching problematic for all children. In an article titled "Children and Television," John Rosemond suggests that you look at your child next time he is watching television and ask yourself what he is doing—or, better yet, what he is not doing. He states:
In answer, the child is not:
Also, because of television's insidious "flicker," television does not promote long-term attention.
Lastly, because the action shifts constantly and capriciously backward, forward and laterally in time, not to mention from subject to subject, television does not promote logical, sequential thinking. (7)
Rosemond notes that the deficiencies listed above are characteristic of learning disabled children, "children who don't seem to 'get it all together' when it comes to learning how to read and write." Although television is not the only cause of the learning problems plaguing our schools, we need to look at the fact that learning disabilities have become epidemic, and functional illiteracy among seventeen-year-olds has steadily risen since television became a mainstay of our culture in 1955.
In her article "Movement or Television," special education expert Audrey McAllen also reports that kindergarten teachers of long experience observe that children show less initiative than formerly and expect grown-ups to start something. They wait passively for something to stimulate them when indoors, and their play lacks the imaginative inventiveness children once had. (8) Rosemond reports the same phenomena: "Veteran teachers consistently report that todays children are less resourceful, imaginative, creative and motivated than pre-television generations. They also comment that the average child's attention span seems to have shortened mysteriously since 1950." (9)
Jane Healy found the same phenomena in interviewing teachers and in her own work with children over the past twenty-five years as a learning specialist, She found through her research in brain development that "fast-paced, nonlinguistic, and visually distracting television may literally have changed children's minds, making sustaining attention to verbal input, such as reading or listening, far less appealing than faster-paced visual stimuli, (This thesis is explored in depth in my book Endangered Minds)" (10) Healy also reported that optometrists and other specialists have found an increase in vision problems among children due to the two-dimensional nature of the images, the flicker, and the Jack of eye movement involved in watching TV and videos. (11) And in 1997 more than 650 viewers aged three to twenty fell ill in Japan with nausea or seizures from the flashing lights in a Pokémon cartoon; 150 were still hospitalized the following day.
Healthy development for the young child must engage all the senses. The young child wants to run and jump in space, touch and grasp with his hands, hold his breath for the fun of it, jump with joy, experience the world for himself with all his senses. "Can I see it?" means "Can I touch it?' The child is hungry to experience everything as fully as possible. Dr. Ann Barber, a developmental optometrist in Santa Ana, California, explains:
When the child is born the wiring is all there, the light hits the retina but he makes no sense of it. He needs to learn by touching, putting things in his mouth, moving around, and then he has to integrate all this with vision and the other senses to make an intelligent child that's ready for school. There are about eight or ten perceptual processes developing in the preschool years that go beyond the eyeball, and so much . . . is done with the body, manipulating objects, dropping toys to learn about distance and develop visual convergence, practicing how to catch or kick a ball, hit a target. The child also must learn to focus on what's important and make sense out of the world. How can you understand "above, below, inside, outside" if you're not crawling into the cardboard box and seeing and feeling it? But today we see so many kids are delayed in these skills—six-, seven-, eight-year-olds who are more at a four-year-old level. (12)
And yet Sesame Street makes parents wonder whether their preschooler will learn "above" and "below' or will somehow be behind if she doesn't watch Grover and company teach it.
Marie Winn, in her book The Plug-In Drug, again emphasizes, "It isn't what your children watch on TV but the act of watching that harms them." She states that with heavy television viewing, the right hemisphere of the brain is developed at the expense of the left. The left hemisphere controls the verbal, rational thought—the ability to read and write, to reason, to organize ideas and express them in speech and writing. Television viewers are bombarded with images that don't require them to think, or even give them time to do so. (13)
With the popularity of children's programming on cable stations, children's viewing is steadily increasing. More than 40 percent of children aged six to eleven have televisions in their bedrooms to watch on their own, and nearly a quarter of toddlers aged two to five also have their own TVs. (14) By the time most children graduate from high school they will typically have spent 35,000 hours in front of a television set—enough for a bachelor's degree in television watching—compared with having spent only 11,000 hours in the classroom. If you subtract hours for sleeping and doing homework, children are left with relatively few hours spent in reading, playing, and doing the other creative activities of childhood. Radically limiting your child's screen time before the age of ten or eleven is probably one of the most far-reaching gifts you can possibly give him or her developmentally. This may mean putting the television set in your bedroom, if there are shows that you or your partner watch regularly while the children are up, or finding another way to keep it covered or inaccessible if your child is a button pusher. You will probably need to put more time into family activities when you first get rid of the television, but then you will find that the children become self-motivating and that you, as well as they, will have more time to do things alone as well as together. The world without television is very different and very much more in keeping with the developmental needs of the young child.
I want to change the kind of toys my child plays with, but she always pesters me to buy her the other ones when we go to the store. I can't just throw everything out. Where can I start?
At first it may be difficult to step outside of the chrome and plastic world of high-tech toys, but as you and your daughter begin to experience more alternatives, it will become easier. Certainly you won't want to take away favorite toys and create lots of strife! Possibly you can make a start by eliminating toys she doesn't play with now. That will clear out some of the clutter and make some space. Then make something, or buy an imaginative toy, and have a special place in her room where it lives or is played with. Invest some energy into the imaginative aspect of it, and make sure that it is put away each day in an attractive manner, ready for the new day. Gradually add toys that encourage imagination while you phase out old ones that are no longer played with. You will find that costumes and toys that invite imaginative play in little scenes will easily become favorites.
Decrease the number of toys of the type you don't want your child to have by requesting that appropriate catalogs be sent to grandparents and others who send gifts. Some parents have a "rainy day box" for gifts and toys that don't match their values for daily play but that can be a fine adventure for a rainy day.
Sometimes it is necessary to go cold turkey, as when we decided to get rid of our television set. We did it at a time when we were moving anyway, so it didn't become associated with patterns in the new home. And, though I had been braced for a loud wail, I was amazed that the children didn't even complain. At first we replaced television time with activities the children were doing at school—knitting, singing, playing recorder, and reading stories out loud—so they wouldn't go around asking what to do now that they couldn't watch television. We also tried to keep television from becoming forbidden fruit by telling the oldest child that he could watch certain events, like special football games, at the neighbor's house if invited. With the younger children, we told the neighbors that we didn't have a television, so they should tell our girls their daughter couldn't play if she wanted to watch television instead. I found being tolerant and avoiding being "holier than thou" helped things go smoothly, without a lot of emotional upset.
Sometimes parents are discouraged by their children playing with neighbors who have different values. You can't continually police your child when he is out of the house, so have faith that your values make the strongest impression on your child. What you can do most effectively is to make your own rules at your house, and then make your house sufficiently attractive that your children and their friends will play there much of the time.
The issue of play with guns, for example, is one that parents need to discuss together and decide for themselves. I still don't have any clear philosophical or psychological answers as to what parents should do on this issue and why; I just knew that I wouldn't buy guns and my children learned that no gun play was allowed in our house. That limited their access without bringing up long discussions or making our neighbors wrong. Children can accept that there are different rules in different places. "This is the way we do it at our house" is enough of an answer to many a "why?" from a young child. Similarly, I told children in my kindergarten that certain play was all right at home but not at school. They didn't have any problem with that.
Ryan loves his video games so much that he'd play through meals if we let him. I'm thinking about some of the things you've said about passive screen time, but video games are more active and encourage eye-hand coordination, don't they?
Video games have become a huge business in this country. Professor Dale Mann of Teacher's College of Columbia University points out that the entertainment industry has now replaced the defense industry as the main developer of technology in the United States, and at least half as much again is spent on entertainment as on education in this country. (15) Although it is true that video games improve the kind of coordination needed by airplane pilots (hence the value of flight simulators in training), they were also used by the military to desensitize recruits to actually firing and killing another person in training during the Vietnam War (this was reported by a high-ranking former Army officer in an article in Time after the killings at Columbine High School in May 1999). As the analysts have said, all television, videos, and video games are educational; the question is, what are they teaching? Consider this development:
Setting the stage for an unprecedented collaboration between the Pentagon and Hollywood, the U.S. Army will announce the formation of a major research center today at the University of Southern California to develop core technologies that are critical to both the military and to the entertainment industry.
The primary goal of the new Institute for Creative Technologies is to allow the Army to create highly realistic training simulations that rely on advances in virtual reality, artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge technologies. The entertainment industry is expected to use the technology to improve its motion picture special effects, make video games more realistic and create new simulation attractions for virtual reality arcades. (16)
Jane Healy found in her research that because video games strongly engage the player, they have more profound effects (good or bad) than viewing TV. They also "decrease the psychological distance" between the child and the medium, especially as games become increasingly sophisticated and realistic. Healy asks that we consider what behaviors and worldviews certain games might be conveying (for example, "this is a violent place where I can't trust anyone"). She also found that the hyperactivation of the adrenaline response that accompanies most video games and even some "educational" computer games may, with repeated experience, become an ingrained physical habit. Measurements of blood pressure, heart rate, and even brain waves during virtual interactions mirror those that would be present in a real-life situation—all without conscious control or being discharged through movement. (17)
Video games prior to the age of seven, while the child is so open in the realm of the senses, simply can't be considered healthy for children. Although video-game-related seizures (called VGRS by neurologists) are rare, a recent study indicated they can occur in youngsters without previous seizure difficulties. Nintendo now attaches a warning of epilepsy-like symptoms triggered by the games' optical stimuli after a handful of teenagers suffered seizures while playing Nintendo video games several years ago. Symptoms include stiffening, shaking, or even losing consciousness for a few seconds, or they may be less dramatic and involve merely staring for a few seconds and then "coming back" with a start. Less dramatic symptoms may also occur as a result of such overstimulation. Robert W. Kubey of Rutgers University reported, "I have many parents report to me that, short of seizures, their children have become nauseated, tired, or listless, or experienced headaches during and after playing a video game. (18)
The later you can postpone the world of video games for your children, the better. If you already have them, or you plan to introduce them into your home, Healy provides valuable guidelines for their use in Failure to Connect. (19)
What about immunizations? I've heard some people say that childhood illnesses could be beneficial. How could this be?
While no one wants his or her child to become ill, many parents today question whether it is necessary to immunize their children with the standard array of more than fifty injections, and at what age the immunizations should be given. There are many opposing views on the subject, and parents need to do their own research and make responsible decisions.
The medical doctors in Germany who are working out of the indications of Rudolf Steiner will not immunize infants until they are one year old, and then they will only immunize for the more serious illnesses, such as polio, diphtheria, and tetanus. They feel that the childhood illnesses such as measles, mumps, chicken pox, and even whooping cough can have beneficial effects. They feel that by activating the immune system in a natural way, childhood illnesses can strengthen it and help prevent susceptibility to other illnesses in later life. (20) Most childhood illnesses are characterized by fevers, which not only activate the immune system but can have developmental benefits as well. Pediatrician Uwe Stave reports:
Fever attacks can affect children in quite a positive way. Even though his physical strength is reduced, the child may disclose a wealth of new interests and skills. He may find new and advanced ways to communicate, think, and handle situations, or display a refinement of his motor skills. In short, after a fever, the child reveals a spurt of development and maturation. Parents, frequently surprised, fail to mention their observation of such development to their physicians. (21)
Dr. Stave explains this observation by referring to the effect of warmth on the process of incarnation:
Fever acts by shaking and loosening up the physical body. Activation by heat can help the Ego form and reshape the physical organization of the young child. In addition, the physiological and biochemical functions of organs and systems are assisted in the maturation process through febrile illness, and inner forces gain strength and become more differentiated. Although the pediatrician often shares parental concern that repeated feverous infections over-stress the young child's fragile organism, fever most often supports development and individualization, although it is sometimes a warning signal, indicating weakness in the child's defense against his environment. As children grow older and learn how to control the will, gradually an "inner fire" replaces the "developmental fever" of a young child. (22)
Many of the childhood illnesses that involve fever, such as measles, chicken pox, and mumps, have nearly become anachronisms through the routine immunization of infants. Parents who choose not to have their children vaccinated for some or all illnesses need to appreciate the seriousness of the diseases and the child's special need for strict home care and medical help in mustering his or her forces to overcome the illness. Measles can't be treated like a common cold or flu; it can develop into pneumonia, encephalitis, or worse. Whooping cough requires weeks of convalescence and may require medicine or other remedies to help fight the illness successfully. (23)
On the other hand, if you do immunize your child, you need to recognize that introducing the illness through the vaccine is a powerful shock to the body. Dr. Wilhelm zur Linden states that the reason vaccinations are given to babies and infants is because older children can react with cramps, fever, vomiting, and confusion. He states, "It is now known that strength with which to counteract the vaccination." (24) He suggests that the homeopathic remedy Thuja 30X given morning and evening starting on the day of vaccination can help protect the child when vaccinations are given. Whether or not to immunize a child, for which illnesses, and at what age are individual decisions that parents must make, as they weigh the pros and cons as best they can.
In order to make informed decisions for your children, you need to gather information on all sides of the issues. The "pro" side is readily available from your pediatrician or health department. However, you need to realize that in public health there are other forces at work than wanting what is best for your individual child. Many of these issues are discussed in detail in the books listed at the end of this chapter.
You have the ultimate responsibility for your child's health and wellbeing. You—not your doctor or state or federal health officials—will live with and be responsible for the consequences of your decisions. Obtain a copy of your state's mandatory vaccination laws and your rights and legal exemptions to vaccination. Work in conjunction with your health care provider to assess what is best for your individual child. Don't be intimidated by medical personnel and forced into a vaccination decision before you are comfortable with your decision. On the other hand, don't let your child come down with whooping cough because you haven't gotten around to figuring out whether or not you're immunizing! It's a lot of work to take responsibility for your child's birth, health, and education, but somebody's got to do it.
How should I care for my child when he is sick?
Before talking about how to care for a sick child, it is necessary to emphasize how important it is that you do care for a sick child. A child needs time and rest to fight off an illness and to consolidate the physical and developmental changes that may be occurring. If given insufficient time to recuperate, the child's system will become weaker and more prone to complications or future infections. Many parents are so harried that they don't think to call everything to a halt and get help (for example, with taking another child to school or going shopping) so they can keep the sick child at home and really attend to his needs. Parents who have to work are often tempted to give antibiotics immediately to suppress the child's symptoms so that he can be back in preschool within twenty-four hours, not realizing that he needs quiet time to regather his inner forces and to heal. And some working parents must take their children to unfamiliar day care centers for sick children if they can't use their own sick days to stay home with a child. Clearly our culture is not set up to meet the needs of children and working parents!
When a child is sick with any illness, certain principles need to be kept in mind. The most important is that the child needs less stimulation so that the forces of the body and of the ego can fight off the illness and go through whatever changes are necessary. This means quiet play, staying in bed, if necessary, and eating lighter foods (which usually means less meat or fewer eggs, which most sick children know naturally). Television is especially to be avoided when the child is sick. It is amazing how most hospitals not only pay so little attention to the environment but also expect patients to get well while watching something like General Hospital on the television!
Once you recognize the importance of home care for a sick child, what should you do? One important thing is to observe your child, both physically and intuitively. With an infant, note how he holds his body when he cries; observe the breathing and the nature of the cough; and note the child's eyes and facial expression. Try to feel what is happening and whether the child is getting better or worse. All good pediatricians will ask the mother for her observations and intuitions about a sick child and will take them seriously. It is important to try to find a doctor with whom you can develop a trusting relationship and feel that you are both working toward the healing of the whole child.
Maintaining the health and vitality of your children is a responsibility that is shared by you and your children in conjunction with their health care providers when they are ill. We are a nation prone to the "quick fix." But, if we can take the time for real healing when our children (or we) are ill, we will have gained a great deal. As parents, there is a great deal we can do to help members of our family when they are ill. Compresses and poultices, herbal teas, and therapeutic touch are all home measures that can be learned to comfort a sick person and aid in healing.
My children are so different from one another that it's as if they're hardly related at all! How can that be?
Parents who have an "easy" child are often silently critical of other parents and think, "If they only would do what I did." Then when their next child comes along and is totally different and a real handful, they are amazed by how different children can be with the same parents. There's nothing like children to keep us humble! Similarly, parents with a "difficult" child may feel like a failure until they have another child who is sweetness and light.
What we need is perspective on how different children can be and why. For one thing, they are unique individuals even if they come from the same genetic pool. In addition, each person has a characteristic way of being and interacting with the world. T. Berry Brazelton, pediatrician and author of Infants and Mothers: Differences in Development, states, "Just as adults have different personalities, so do babies, and these personalities are distinctive almost from birth." He develops the idea of three basic personalities in infants—quiet, average, and active—and each is quite normal. (25)
Rudolf Steiner recognized four basic "temperaments," or groups of traits. Although everyone is a mixture of several of the temperaments, one tends to dominate. By gaining insight into your child's and your own temperament, you can understand how people can be so different and will be able to try different ways of parenting and teaching children with different temperaments.
The first type of person Steiner described is one who has an abundance of energy and likes to do things. As adults they are quick to see the future and want to manifest things. Such children are very powerful, with tremendous force of will and action. They tend to dominate in play, using images of power such as eagles, tornadoes, or bears. Their emotions tend to be hard to control—especially anger, aggression, and annoyance—and they become frustrated if not given enough opportunity to engage their abilities. They can be overbearing, but they also have positive leadership abilities and can be characterized as the "movers and shakers" who make things happen. They tend to be compactly and powerfully built, and walk with their heels dug into the ground. Well-known historical examples of this choleric or fiery temperament are Napoleon and Teddy Roosevelt.
Contrast that child with one who is dreamy and likes to sit. Sometimes movement seems like too much effort for this type of child. These children are very concerned with the comfort of their bodies, and their favorite part of the day is often snack time or mealtime. When they interact with other children, they usually have a harmonizing effect; often they are content to just sit and watch. These children are very comforted by routine and rhythm; they are hard to get started, but they are equally hard to change, so loyalty is one of their virtues. Transitions and any kind of change are hard for these children, and they can have as many temper tantrums as the choleric child. Such a child will become engrossed in anything he starts and will keep at something like a painting until the paper has a hole in it! Such a phlegmatic temperament is related to the element of water, with its rhythmical wave action that goes on and on without tiring.
A third type of temperament appears in the child who is almost always bright and happy. He or she is usually very cheerful, with tears changing to laughter as quickly as they appear. This child seems to barely touch the ground, and in fact can be observed to walk on the toes much of the time. These children can be very easy to parent; the difficulty in the elementary grades is in getting them to finish their work. Their interest is so ephemeral that they're like butterflies flitting from one thing to the next. They are quick and observant and enthusiastically rush into things, but tend to lack follow-through. They are so aware of sense impressions that they are easily distracted by each new thing. This sanguine temperament is related to the quality of air, which is light and always changing.
To round out our description of the four temperaments, picture a child who is often very inward, more involved in his or her own emotional world than in external action. This kind of child is not so easy to spot in early childhood, because most young children seem to be happy much of the time, but as they grow older, such children seem to take everything personally and experience a great deal of personal suffering (for example, because someone doesn't like him, or because one child didn't give her a valentine). Crying at his or her birthday party is often typical of this child. The positive side of this temperament is a very compassionate and caring nature, but the negative side is extreme sensitivity, as they are more caught up in their own reactions than in what is actually happening. They tend to live in the past, to contemplate their thoughts, memories, and emotional reactions, and they never forget or let go of something. This melancholic temperament is related to the element of the earth, offering resistance to what is happening; but, like geode stones with shining crystals inside, such people have a rich inner life of thoughts and feelings and can be very caring.
Knowledge of the temperaments is an invaluable tool for parents and teachers because it can increase our understanding and compassion for someone who is different from ourselves. A person's temperament changes from childhood to adulthood in characteristic ways, and anyone interested in this fascinating area is encouraged to read Steiner's The Four Temperaments. (26)
My husband and I don't go to church, but we want to do something with our child in terms of religious instruction or upbringing. We don't just want to send her off to Sunday school, but what can we do that is meaningful and appropriate?
Having children usually brings up questions about your own experiences with religion as a child, your current spiritual orientation, and what you (both) want for the children. Many times children lead parents back into a relationship with the religion of their childhood, which they rediscover with new depth and meaning. Because the expression of spiritual beliefs is so individual, I encourage you and your partner to discuss them together and work toward finding or creating an appropriate expression of your beliefs that is suitable for your children as they grow.
It is our job as parents to acclimatize the child to this new land, this new condition of life on earth, but to do this in such a way that the child is not driven into forgetfulness of his or her true origin and ultimate goal. How can we help our children develop their innate religious sense? How can we feed their spiritual hunger? How can we assist them in developing their spiritual nature? These questions are addressed in The Spiritual Hunger of the Modern Child, a compilation of ten lectures by notable speakers representing a variety of religious perspectives, including Judaism, Christianity, Subud, and Buddhism. (27) In great depth the writers discuss the nature of children, the effect of the home environment, the use of prayer, the power of attraction, heredity, and conscience.
All of the writers agree that who you are and what you do around young children are more important than religious dogmas or indoctrination. Reviewer René Knight-Weiler summarized the book's common theme thus: "Religion must be caught, not taught, and indeed it cannot be caught from someone who doesn't truly have it. It will be caught through practice, feeling, symbolism, image and spirit in the home. (28)
In one of the essays, the Reverend Adam Littleton of the Christian Community speaks on the ideas of Rudolf Steiner and echoes the theme that the real work of early childhood is work on oneself: "That is really the fundamental thing to satisfy the spiritual hunger of the child—that the grown-up does not stop working upon himself, that no day does he stop working on himself." (29)
Joseph Chilton Pearce, in Magical Child Matures, (30) emphasizes this same theme: in order for the child to be whole, he must have a model who is whole. While none of us qualifies as a fully realized human being (and our children must know this!), our striving, efforts, awareness, and yearning communicate to the child and are far more valuable than either complete materialism or sanctimonious piety, both of which children can see through and reject as false.
Sanctuaries of Childhood, by Shea Darian, and her book Living Passages for the Whole Family together provide a rich foundation for developing ways to honor and celebrate the spiritual in family life. (31) Principles to keep in mind include not calling on the intellect or giving moral exhortations but instead providing stories and images that awaken in the child a feeling for the holidays or the qualities one is trying to convey.
Because of the imitative nature of the young child, the child's experiences during any kind of Sunday school will have a deeper effect than the words that are spoken, just as who you are and what you do speak more clearly than your words. Thus it is important to give attention to the quality of this experience in your church, temple, or mosque. Is there an atmosphere of calm and warmth in the early childhood classes? Do the activities and methods fit the nature of the young child? You may find that you have to become a teacher yourself!
According to Steiner, the imitative nature of the young child has a spiritual basis. In speaking of the young child, he says:
He is still filled with the devotion that one develops in the spiritual world. It is for this reason that he gives himself up to his environment by imitating the people around him. What then is the fundamental impulse, the completely unconscious mood of the child before the change of teeth? This fundamental mood is a very beautiful one, and it must be fostered in the child. It proceeds from the assumption, from the unconscious assumption, that the whole world is of a moral nature. (32)
The child gives himself over to the people and objects of the world with the assumption that they are good and then imitates them. Steiner states:
The child is completely given up to his environment. In adult life the only parallel to this devotion is in religion, expressed in the soul and spirit of man. . . . [The adult's] own soul and spirit are given up to the divine spirit of the world. The child gives up his whole being to his environment. In the adult the activities of breathing, digestion and circulation are within himself, cut off from the outside world. In the child all these activities are given up to his environment and are therefore by nature religious. This is the essential feature of the life of the children between birth and the change of teeth; his whole being is permeated by a kind of "natural-religious" element, and even the physical body is in a religious mood. (33)
In another lecture, Steiner clarifies:
It is not the soul of the child that is given up to the environment, but its blood circulation, its breathing activities and processes of nourishment through the food it takes in. All these things are given up to the environment. The blood circulation, the breathing and the nourishment processes are praying to the environment. Naturally, such expressions seem paradoxical, but in their very paradox they present the truth. (34)
If we observe such a thing with our whole being and not with the theoretical intellect, then we will develop an attitude or mood in being with young children that Steiner calls "priestly." Thus parents, child care providers, and early childhood teachers are like "caretakers of the divine" as they recognize divinity in the child and introduce him or her to earthly life through the sacred qualities of rhythm, beauty, and love. Although I feel it is beneficial to recognize the importance of our role with young children, I am the first to admit the shortcomings in my attitudes and actions in bringing up my own children and in being with young children in many given moments. However, we not only try to do the best we can, but we can also strive to do better, for the most important work of the parent with young children is inner work on oneself. The young child trustingly accepts us as perfect and good; once he becomes older and sees our imperfections, the most important thing is that the child sees we are striving to do better. Our desire for inner growth (or our complacency) is perceived by the child and has a very deep effect on him.
How can we help the child's natural development of religious feeling? Because the child is so given over to the environment, we help the child by furthering an attitude of gratitude in ourselves and hence in the child for all that the world gives us. Steiner explains:
If he sees that everyone who stands in some kind of relationship to him in the outer world shows gratitude for what he receives from this world; if, in confronting the outer world and wanting to imitate it, the child sees the kind of gestures that express gratitude, then a great deal is done towards establishing in him the right moral human attitude. Gratitude is what belongs to the first seven years of life. (35)
Reverence is another attitude important to foster in early childhood. Steiner explains how this quality transforms:
If one observes children who, by a right upbringing, have developed a natural reverence for the grownups in their surroundings, and if one follows them through their various stages of life, one can discover that their feelings of reverence and devotion in childhood are gradually being transformed during the years leading to old age. As adults such persons may have a healing effect upon their fellowmen so that by their mere presence, or through the tone of their voice, or perhaps by a single glance they can spread inner peace to others. Their presence can be a blessing because as children they have learned to venerate and to pray in the right way. No hands can bless in old age, unless in childhood they have been folded in prayer. (36)
However, qualities such as reverence and prayer cannot be taught to a young child through doctrine or exhortation. They must live within the parents. If prayer is a living reality for the mother or father, then he or she can communicate that to the child and teach him, through example, about prayer. Think about your own childhood. What experiences brought you closer to the Divine? Which people seemed to have a special quality? Looking at spiritual questions can be another great gift that your children bring to you.
RECOMMENDED RESOURCES
Health and Illness
Immunizing Your Children
Media and Children
Religious Life
NOTES
Bibliography - You Are Your Child's First Teacher
Even if I wanted to provide an idyllic world for my young child, I don't think I could do it. Modern life is just too fast-paced and stressful. Besides, don't children need to adjust to the realities of today's world?
The best way to prepare your children for the stresses of today's world is not to expose them to problems early in their life, but to provide them with an environment that is warm and nurturing and that shelters them from as many of the problems of the adult world as possible. Child psychologist David Elkind has discussed at length the difficulties children encounter when they are hurried to grow up and face adult choices too soon, or when they are subjected to miseducation in academic subjects, swimming, gymnastics, ballet, and so forth. (1) Kim John Payne has found similar effects in his counseling practice with children and families and has outlined many practical suggestions in his book Simplicity Parenting.
The rushed lives that most of us live make it difficult to provide children with an ideal world for their early childhood years. We tend to move frequently or travel a lot, to work too much and be too busy, and to move too fast for the tempo of our children. Divorce, single parenting, and blended families all add to the stresses of a child. And, with the best intentions, many parents push their children to achieve at an early age or to be grown-up emotional companions for them.
Yet there is a great deal that parents can do for their children by providing an environment filled with love and warmth. By understanding a young child's development and his complete openness to his surroundings, we can do our best to provide a stable and nurturing environment within our current living situation. Fortunately, children are very giving and forgiving—and fairly resilient.
Now that we have recognized some of the ways in which children differ from adults, how can we let them be children in a society in which changing family, social, and academic pressures make them deal with the adult world earlier than they are ready? Most of us can't radically change our life situations, even if we wanted to. For the most part we are members of our highly technological, urban, material-minded society. Yet no matter where we find ourselves, many ways to meet the real needs of the young child have been suggested in this book. In summary:
- Attend to your own life and emotions. The emotional environment you create for your child is far more important than the material environment.
- Honor the spiritual element in life, especially as it is brought to you by your children.
- Work toward rhythm in family life that can support you and your children.
- Remember that imitation and repetition, not reasoning and punishment, are the keys to discipline with the young child.
- Set limits and enforce them consistently; accept that you are the parent.
- Allow plenty of time for your child's creative free play as well as musical and artistic play. Allow time for just being home and "doing nothing."
- Buy or make childlike toys that encourage imaginative play. Simplify and phase out other toys.
- Avoid pressuring your child to be an early achiever in academics, sports, or the arts. Keep it unstructured and fun!
- Continue to pay attention to what your child experiences, limiting overstimulation from loud music, movies, and television.
- Avoid concerning your child with adult problems through news broadcasts, conversations, and so forth. Even third graders don't yet need to be taught about AIDS or substance abuse, as they have no way of comprehending such things!
- Read Simplicity Parenting and see whether there is a support group in your area.
Your description of a play-oriented kindergarten leaves me wondering whether it really prepares children for the high-tech world in which we live. What about computer literacy? I want my child to have a competitive edge, not be behind the times.
Every parent should read Jane Healy's extensively researched book Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect Our Children's Minds—for Better and Worse. She reviews numerous studies about what is and isn't working with educational software, both at home and in the schools. She also provides recommendations for evaluating games and educational programs before purchasing them and gives vital guidelines for parents in starting and guiding their child's computer use at home. She also shares her understanding, as a learning specialist and developmental neuropsychologist, of the effects that video games and extensive computer use may be having in actually changing children's "wiring' through hours of rapidly changing visual images. And she makes recommendations for protecting children's health, pointing out that if employers let people use computers under the conditions found in most schools, they would be cited by OSHA. In fact, the American Academy of Pediatrics has expressed concern about how much time children spend in front of various types of screens and recommends that a "media history," including the amount and type of computer, television, and video use, be taken by physicians as a routine part of a child's media record for diagnosis of media-related problems—physical, academic, and emotional. (2)
Precisely because computers are changing our world so rapidly, what children will need most in the future is the ability to think creatively. Most of the jobs that your children will be entering don't even exist today! The qualities that children will need in the future are not technical skills, but mental habits such as analytical thinking and problem solving, the ability to communicate, imagination, values, persistence, creativity, kindness, and tolerance. Todd Oppenheimer reported in his Atlantic Monthly article, "The Computer Delusion," that even high-tech corporations that are seeking creative employees rarely hire people who are primarily computer experts. Rather, they look for innovation, teamwork, flexibility, and innovative thinking, qualities they often find lacking in many "technology nerds." (3)
Children who start to use computers in preschool show no demonstrable advantage over those who start using them at age twelve or fourteen. Computers, as word processors and vehicles for logical thinking through programming, are suited to the adolescent, not the preschool-age child! Computers as toys are inappropriate, because they present a two-dimensional abstraction of the world to the young child, who should be moving and playing and acquiring a broad base of experiences of the physical world and the world of imaginative play. The visual image on the computer screen is especially hard on the developing eyes of the young child.
Because children's senses and brains are developing throughout childhood, Healy says that "age-appropriate computer use may help establish some forms of connections, but inappropriate use may also build resistant habits that interfere with academic learning. Once set into the brain's connectivity, such patterns are hard to break." (4) Parents, like educators in the nation's schools, are jumping on the bandwagon that every child should be computer literate and be on the Internet without sufficiently investigating the nature of brain development, how children learn, and what is necessary for healthy development at various ages.
Most of the educational programs for young children try to teach concepts at too young an age. Remember that the young child needs to be addressed through movement and imitation. Steiner says, "Have we the right to believe that with our intellectual mode of knowledge we can ever participate in the experience of the outer world which a child has, the child who is all sense-organ? This we cannot do It is immensely important that we do not consciously or unconsciously call upon the child's intellect prematurely, as people are so prone to do today." (5)
We need to remember how the fantasy and play of the young child transform into the artistic imagination of the elementary-school child, the questioning of the teenager, and the rational thinking of the young adult. Then we will have confidence that fantasy and imagination, which are so natural for the young child, form a better foundation for later creative thinking than early learning. Creative thinking is more needed in our highly technological world than four-year-olds who can tap the screen of an iPad or manipulate the mouse of a computer.
My five-year-old has always been precocious and already reads. And he can out-reason me in getting what he wants. If we want to try to encourage balanced development, what can we do now? He can't go back to early childhood!
In working toward balanced development, it is necessary to have a picture of your child that includes more than intellectual achievements. What is he like emotionally? Is he happy being a child? Does he relate well with other children, or almost exclusively with adults? What is he like physically? Is he at home in his body and well coordinated? Does he have frequent illnesses and require antibiotics?
Many times early intellectual awakening can result in a weakening of the child's vital forces, manifesting in frequent colds or other illnesses. The dreamy state of early childhood is an essential element in the healthy formation of the physical body during the first seven years. The intellect is crystalline and hardening in its effect. When it is engaged prematurely, it can inhibit the proper development of the physical organs and the unfolding of the fluid emotions. Steiner even relates some illnesses in later life to influences in the first seven years:
Whoever studies the whole course of a man's life from birth to death, bearing in mind the requirements of which I have spoken, will see that a child who has been exposed to things suitable only to grown-up people and who imitates these things will learn in his later years, from the age of about 50, suffer from sclerosis ... Illnesses that appear in later life are often only the result of educational errors made in the very earliest years of childhood. (6)
Because the job of the intellect is to analyze and exercise critical judgment, very bright children tend to have difficulty relating emotionally with other children, a problem that can intensify as the child becomes older.
While an awakened child cannot go back to the dreamy world of early childhood, imaginative play and the arts can have a healing influence on the child's life forces, helping to "reweave the web" that protects the child during the first seven years. Images from fairy tales are also nurturing to the unconscious elements of the young child.
Although you can't go back in time and do things differently with your child, it is also important not to feel guilty about choices you have already made. You were just as good a parent then as you are now. You made the best decisions you could then, based on your knowledge and perceptions of your choices. Guilt only takes us out of the present moment and makes us less able to see what is needed now, thus perpetuating problems rather than leading to meeting the present creatively. If there is going to be the possibility of healing, it must take place in the present. We make the best choices we can for our children in each moment, just as our parents did for us.
Why do you suggest eliminating television for young children? We only let Jessica watch educational programs and she loves them!
Probably anyone who is reading this book is concerned enough about their children's development that they think seriously about television watching and have probably limited it in some ways, to only certain programs, a certain amount of time, or watching programs together and talking about them, for example. However, the problem is twofold. First, television watching, including DVDs, is very seductive, and the time children spend doing it expands the moment your awareness drops. This is because it entertains the child and buys time for you as a parent. Creative play does the same thing, but television watching tends to squelch imagination and free play, leaving only bored children and more need for TV or another movie!
Second, any amount and any kind of screen time—TV, DVD, video game, or computer—is not healthy for the young child, regardless of the content of the program. In 1999 the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended that children under the age of two not watch any television for healthy development. That was done in the face of statistics that show two-year-olds spend an average of twenty-seven hours a week watching television. There has also been recent heavy marketing of television programs designed for toddlers under the age of two. The doctors also recommended that older children not have televisions in their bedrooms.
I was delighted that the pediatricians finally took the most rudimentary stand for child health, developmentally appropriate activities, and brain development with regard to the media. And I was astounded that they took so much criticism for it, from editorials in the New York Times to the Sacramento Bee. The primary criticisms were that their recommendations were dogmatic, unrealistic, and unscientific, because studies of the effects of TV viewing on infants and toddlers haven't been done yet. When the "experts" finally recommend something sensible, society discredits them as "unscientific."
Television is an important source of information and diversion for most adults. But children are not in the same stage of development as adults. The lack of physical movement and the rapidly changing sensory stimulation on the screen make television watching problematic for all children. In an article titled "Children and Television," John Rosemond suggests that you look at your child next time he is watching television and ask yourself what he is doing—or, better yet, what he is not doing. He states:
In answer, the child is not:
- scanning
- practicing motor skills, gross or fine
- practicing eye-hand coordination
- using more than two senses
- asking questions
- exploring
- exercising initiative or motivation
- being challenged
- solving problems
- thinking analytically
- exercising imagination
- practicing communication skills
- being either creative or constructive
Also, because of television's insidious "flicker," television does not promote long-term attention.
Lastly, because the action shifts constantly and capriciously backward, forward and laterally in time, not to mention from subject to subject, television does not promote logical, sequential thinking. (7)
Rosemond notes that the deficiencies listed above are characteristic of learning disabled children, "children who don't seem to 'get it all together' when it comes to learning how to read and write." Although television is not the only cause of the learning problems plaguing our schools, we need to look at the fact that learning disabilities have become epidemic, and functional illiteracy among seventeen-year-olds has steadily risen since television became a mainstay of our culture in 1955.
In her article "Movement or Television," special education expert Audrey McAllen also reports that kindergarten teachers of long experience observe that children show less initiative than formerly and expect grown-ups to start something. They wait passively for something to stimulate them when indoors, and their play lacks the imaginative inventiveness children once had. (8) Rosemond reports the same phenomena: "Veteran teachers consistently report that todays children are less resourceful, imaginative, creative and motivated than pre-television generations. They also comment that the average child's attention span seems to have shortened mysteriously since 1950." (9)
Jane Healy found the same phenomena in interviewing teachers and in her own work with children over the past twenty-five years as a learning specialist, She found through her research in brain development that "fast-paced, nonlinguistic, and visually distracting television may literally have changed children's minds, making sustaining attention to verbal input, such as reading or listening, far less appealing than faster-paced visual stimuli, (This thesis is explored in depth in my book Endangered Minds)" (10) Healy also reported that optometrists and other specialists have found an increase in vision problems among children due to the two-dimensional nature of the images, the flicker, and the Jack of eye movement involved in watching TV and videos. (11) And in 1997 more than 650 viewers aged three to twenty fell ill in Japan with nausea or seizures from the flashing lights in a Pokémon cartoon; 150 were still hospitalized the following day.
Healthy development for the young child must engage all the senses. The young child wants to run and jump in space, touch and grasp with his hands, hold his breath for the fun of it, jump with joy, experience the world for himself with all his senses. "Can I see it?" means "Can I touch it?' The child is hungry to experience everything as fully as possible. Dr. Ann Barber, a developmental optometrist in Santa Ana, California, explains:
When the child is born the wiring is all there, the light hits the retina but he makes no sense of it. He needs to learn by touching, putting things in his mouth, moving around, and then he has to integrate all this with vision and the other senses to make an intelligent child that's ready for school. There are about eight or ten perceptual processes developing in the preschool years that go beyond the eyeball, and so much . . . is done with the body, manipulating objects, dropping toys to learn about distance and develop visual convergence, practicing how to catch or kick a ball, hit a target. The child also must learn to focus on what's important and make sense out of the world. How can you understand "above, below, inside, outside" if you're not crawling into the cardboard box and seeing and feeling it? But today we see so many kids are delayed in these skills—six-, seven-, eight-year-olds who are more at a four-year-old level. (12)
And yet Sesame Street makes parents wonder whether their preschooler will learn "above" and "below' or will somehow be behind if she doesn't watch Grover and company teach it.
Marie Winn, in her book The Plug-In Drug, again emphasizes, "It isn't what your children watch on TV but the act of watching that harms them." She states that with heavy television viewing, the right hemisphere of the brain is developed at the expense of the left. The left hemisphere controls the verbal, rational thought—the ability to read and write, to reason, to organize ideas and express them in speech and writing. Television viewers are bombarded with images that don't require them to think, or even give them time to do so. (13)
With the popularity of children's programming on cable stations, children's viewing is steadily increasing. More than 40 percent of children aged six to eleven have televisions in their bedrooms to watch on their own, and nearly a quarter of toddlers aged two to five also have their own TVs. (14) By the time most children graduate from high school they will typically have spent 35,000 hours in front of a television set—enough for a bachelor's degree in television watching—compared with having spent only 11,000 hours in the classroom. If you subtract hours for sleeping and doing homework, children are left with relatively few hours spent in reading, playing, and doing the other creative activities of childhood. Radically limiting your child's screen time before the age of ten or eleven is probably one of the most far-reaching gifts you can possibly give him or her developmentally. This may mean putting the television set in your bedroom, if there are shows that you or your partner watch regularly while the children are up, or finding another way to keep it covered or inaccessible if your child is a button pusher. You will probably need to put more time into family activities when you first get rid of the television, but then you will find that the children become self-motivating and that you, as well as they, will have more time to do things alone as well as together. The world without television is very different and very much more in keeping with the developmental needs of the young child.
I want to change the kind of toys my child plays with, but she always pesters me to buy her the other ones when we go to the store. I can't just throw everything out. Where can I start?
At first it may be difficult to step outside of the chrome and plastic world of high-tech toys, but as you and your daughter begin to experience more alternatives, it will become easier. Certainly you won't want to take away favorite toys and create lots of strife! Possibly you can make a start by eliminating toys she doesn't play with now. That will clear out some of the clutter and make some space. Then make something, or buy an imaginative toy, and have a special place in her room where it lives or is played with. Invest some energy into the imaginative aspect of it, and make sure that it is put away each day in an attractive manner, ready for the new day. Gradually add toys that encourage imagination while you phase out old ones that are no longer played with. You will find that costumes and toys that invite imaginative play in little scenes will easily become favorites.
Decrease the number of toys of the type you don't want your child to have by requesting that appropriate catalogs be sent to grandparents and others who send gifts. Some parents have a "rainy day box" for gifts and toys that don't match their values for daily play but that can be a fine adventure for a rainy day.
Sometimes it is necessary to go cold turkey, as when we decided to get rid of our television set. We did it at a time when we were moving anyway, so it didn't become associated with patterns in the new home. And, though I had been braced for a loud wail, I was amazed that the children didn't even complain. At first we replaced television time with activities the children were doing at school—knitting, singing, playing recorder, and reading stories out loud—so they wouldn't go around asking what to do now that they couldn't watch television. We also tried to keep television from becoming forbidden fruit by telling the oldest child that he could watch certain events, like special football games, at the neighbor's house if invited. With the younger children, we told the neighbors that we didn't have a television, so they should tell our girls their daughter couldn't play if she wanted to watch television instead. I found being tolerant and avoiding being "holier than thou" helped things go smoothly, without a lot of emotional upset.
Sometimes parents are discouraged by their children playing with neighbors who have different values. You can't continually police your child when he is out of the house, so have faith that your values make the strongest impression on your child. What you can do most effectively is to make your own rules at your house, and then make your house sufficiently attractive that your children and their friends will play there much of the time.
The issue of play with guns, for example, is one that parents need to discuss together and decide for themselves. I still don't have any clear philosophical or psychological answers as to what parents should do on this issue and why; I just knew that I wouldn't buy guns and my children learned that no gun play was allowed in our house. That limited their access without bringing up long discussions or making our neighbors wrong. Children can accept that there are different rules in different places. "This is the way we do it at our house" is enough of an answer to many a "why?" from a young child. Similarly, I told children in my kindergarten that certain play was all right at home but not at school. They didn't have any problem with that.
Ryan loves his video games so much that he'd play through meals if we let him. I'm thinking about some of the things you've said about passive screen time, but video games are more active and encourage eye-hand coordination, don't they?
Video games have become a huge business in this country. Professor Dale Mann of Teacher's College of Columbia University points out that the entertainment industry has now replaced the defense industry as the main developer of technology in the United States, and at least half as much again is spent on entertainment as on education in this country. (15) Although it is true that video games improve the kind of coordination needed by airplane pilots (hence the value of flight simulators in training), they were also used by the military to desensitize recruits to actually firing and killing another person in training during the Vietnam War (this was reported by a high-ranking former Army officer in an article in Time after the killings at Columbine High School in May 1999). As the analysts have said, all television, videos, and video games are educational; the question is, what are they teaching? Consider this development:
Setting the stage for an unprecedented collaboration between the Pentagon and Hollywood, the U.S. Army will announce the formation of a major research center today at the University of Southern California to develop core technologies that are critical to both the military and to the entertainment industry.
The primary goal of the new Institute for Creative Technologies is to allow the Army to create highly realistic training simulations that rely on advances in virtual reality, artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge technologies. The entertainment industry is expected to use the technology to improve its motion picture special effects, make video games more realistic and create new simulation attractions for virtual reality arcades. (16)
Jane Healy found in her research that because video games strongly engage the player, they have more profound effects (good or bad) than viewing TV. They also "decrease the psychological distance" between the child and the medium, especially as games become increasingly sophisticated and realistic. Healy asks that we consider what behaviors and worldviews certain games might be conveying (for example, "this is a violent place where I can't trust anyone"). She also found that the hyperactivation of the adrenaline response that accompanies most video games and even some "educational" computer games may, with repeated experience, become an ingrained physical habit. Measurements of blood pressure, heart rate, and even brain waves during virtual interactions mirror those that would be present in a real-life situation—all without conscious control or being discharged through movement. (17)
Video games prior to the age of seven, while the child is so open in the realm of the senses, simply can't be considered healthy for children. Although video-game-related seizures (called VGRS by neurologists) are rare, a recent study indicated they can occur in youngsters without previous seizure difficulties. Nintendo now attaches a warning of epilepsy-like symptoms triggered by the games' optical stimuli after a handful of teenagers suffered seizures while playing Nintendo video games several years ago. Symptoms include stiffening, shaking, or even losing consciousness for a few seconds, or they may be less dramatic and involve merely staring for a few seconds and then "coming back" with a start. Less dramatic symptoms may also occur as a result of such overstimulation. Robert W. Kubey of Rutgers University reported, "I have many parents report to me that, short of seizures, their children have become nauseated, tired, or listless, or experienced headaches during and after playing a video game. (18)
The later you can postpone the world of video games for your children, the better. If you already have them, or you plan to introduce them into your home, Healy provides valuable guidelines for their use in Failure to Connect. (19)
What about immunizations? I've heard some people say that childhood illnesses could be beneficial. How could this be?
While no one wants his or her child to become ill, many parents today question whether it is necessary to immunize their children with the standard array of more than fifty injections, and at what age the immunizations should be given. There are many opposing views on the subject, and parents need to do their own research and make responsible decisions.
The medical doctors in Germany who are working out of the indications of Rudolf Steiner will not immunize infants until they are one year old, and then they will only immunize for the more serious illnesses, such as polio, diphtheria, and tetanus. They feel that the childhood illnesses such as measles, mumps, chicken pox, and even whooping cough can have beneficial effects. They feel that by activating the immune system in a natural way, childhood illnesses can strengthen it and help prevent susceptibility to other illnesses in later life. (20) Most childhood illnesses are characterized by fevers, which not only activate the immune system but can have developmental benefits as well. Pediatrician Uwe Stave reports:
Fever attacks can affect children in quite a positive way. Even though his physical strength is reduced, the child may disclose a wealth of new interests and skills. He may find new and advanced ways to communicate, think, and handle situations, or display a refinement of his motor skills. In short, after a fever, the child reveals a spurt of development and maturation. Parents, frequently surprised, fail to mention their observation of such development to their physicians. (21)
Dr. Stave explains this observation by referring to the effect of warmth on the process of incarnation:
Fever acts by shaking and loosening up the physical body. Activation by heat can help the Ego form and reshape the physical organization of the young child. In addition, the physiological and biochemical functions of organs and systems are assisted in the maturation process through febrile illness, and inner forces gain strength and become more differentiated. Although the pediatrician often shares parental concern that repeated feverous infections over-stress the young child's fragile organism, fever most often supports development and individualization, although it is sometimes a warning signal, indicating weakness in the child's defense against his environment. As children grow older and learn how to control the will, gradually an "inner fire" replaces the "developmental fever" of a young child. (22)
Many of the childhood illnesses that involve fever, such as measles, chicken pox, and mumps, have nearly become anachronisms through the routine immunization of infants. Parents who choose not to have their children vaccinated for some or all illnesses need to appreciate the seriousness of the diseases and the child's special need for strict home care and medical help in mustering his or her forces to overcome the illness. Measles can't be treated like a common cold or flu; it can develop into pneumonia, encephalitis, or worse. Whooping cough requires weeks of convalescence and may require medicine or other remedies to help fight the illness successfully. (23)
On the other hand, if you do immunize your child, you need to recognize that introducing the illness through the vaccine is a powerful shock to the body. Dr. Wilhelm zur Linden states that the reason vaccinations are given to babies and infants is because older children can react with cramps, fever, vomiting, and confusion. He states, "It is now known that strength with which to counteract the vaccination." (24) He suggests that the homeopathic remedy Thuja 30X given morning and evening starting on the day of vaccination can help protect the child when vaccinations are given. Whether or not to immunize a child, for which illnesses, and at what age are individual decisions that parents must make, as they weigh the pros and cons as best they can.
In order to make informed decisions for your children, you need to gather information on all sides of the issues. The "pro" side is readily available from your pediatrician or health department. However, you need to realize that in public health there are other forces at work than wanting what is best for your individual child. Many of these issues are discussed in detail in the books listed at the end of this chapter.
You have the ultimate responsibility for your child's health and wellbeing. You—not your doctor or state or federal health officials—will live with and be responsible for the consequences of your decisions. Obtain a copy of your state's mandatory vaccination laws and your rights and legal exemptions to vaccination. Work in conjunction with your health care provider to assess what is best for your individual child. Don't be intimidated by medical personnel and forced into a vaccination decision before you are comfortable with your decision. On the other hand, don't let your child come down with whooping cough because you haven't gotten around to figuring out whether or not you're immunizing! It's a lot of work to take responsibility for your child's birth, health, and education, but somebody's got to do it.
How should I care for my child when he is sick?
Before talking about how to care for a sick child, it is necessary to emphasize how important it is that you do care for a sick child. A child needs time and rest to fight off an illness and to consolidate the physical and developmental changes that may be occurring. If given insufficient time to recuperate, the child's system will become weaker and more prone to complications or future infections. Many parents are so harried that they don't think to call everything to a halt and get help (for example, with taking another child to school or going shopping) so they can keep the sick child at home and really attend to his needs. Parents who have to work are often tempted to give antibiotics immediately to suppress the child's symptoms so that he can be back in preschool within twenty-four hours, not realizing that he needs quiet time to regather his inner forces and to heal. And some working parents must take their children to unfamiliar day care centers for sick children if they can't use their own sick days to stay home with a child. Clearly our culture is not set up to meet the needs of children and working parents!
When a child is sick with any illness, certain principles need to be kept in mind. The most important is that the child needs less stimulation so that the forces of the body and of the ego can fight off the illness and go through whatever changes are necessary. This means quiet play, staying in bed, if necessary, and eating lighter foods (which usually means less meat or fewer eggs, which most sick children know naturally). Television is especially to be avoided when the child is sick. It is amazing how most hospitals not only pay so little attention to the environment but also expect patients to get well while watching something like General Hospital on the television!
Once you recognize the importance of home care for a sick child, what should you do? One important thing is to observe your child, both physically and intuitively. With an infant, note how he holds his body when he cries; observe the breathing and the nature of the cough; and note the child's eyes and facial expression. Try to feel what is happening and whether the child is getting better or worse. All good pediatricians will ask the mother for her observations and intuitions about a sick child and will take them seriously. It is important to try to find a doctor with whom you can develop a trusting relationship and feel that you are both working toward the healing of the whole child.
Maintaining the health and vitality of your children is a responsibility that is shared by you and your children in conjunction with their health care providers when they are ill. We are a nation prone to the "quick fix." But, if we can take the time for real healing when our children (or we) are ill, we will have gained a great deal. As parents, there is a great deal we can do to help members of our family when they are ill. Compresses and poultices, herbal teas, and therapeutic touch are all home measures that can be learned to comfort a sick person and aid in healing.
My children are so different from one another that it's as if they're hardly related at all! How can that be?
Parents who have an "easy" child are often silently critical of other parents and think, "If they only would do what I did." Then when their next child comes along and is totally different and a real handful, they are amazed by how different children can be with the same parents. There's nothing like children to keep us humble! Similarly, parents with a "difficult" child may feel like a failure until they have another child who is sweetness and light.
What we need is perspective on how different children can be and why. For one thing, they are unique individuals even if they come from the same genetic pool. In addition, each person has a characteristic way of being and interacting with the world. T. Berry Brazelton, pediatrician and author of Infants and Mothers: Differences in Development, states, "Just as adults have different personalities, so do babies, and these personalities are distinctive almost from birth." He develops the idea of three basic personalities in infants—quiet, average, and active—and each is quite normal. (25)
Rudolf Steiner recognized four basic "temperaments," or groups of traits. Although everyone is a mixture of several of the temperaments, one tends to dominate. By gaining insight into your child's and your own temperament, you can understand how people can be so different and will be able to try different ways of parenting and teaching children with different temperaments.
The first type of person Steiner described is one who has an abundance of energy and likes to do things. As adults they are quick to see the future and want to manifest things. Such children are very powerful, with tremendous force of will and action. They tend to dominate in play, using images of power such as eagles, tornadoes, or bears. Their emotions tend to be hard to control—especially anger, aggression, and annoyance—and they become frustrated if not given enough opportunity to engage their abilities. They can be overbearing, but they also have positive leadership abilities and can be characterized as the "movers and shakers" who make things happen. They tend to be compactly and powerfully built, and walk with their heels dug into the ground. Well-known historical examples of this choleric or fiery temperament are Napoleon and Teddy Roosevelt.
Contrast that child with one who is dreamy and likes to sit. Sometimes movement seems like too much effort for this type of child. These children are very concerned with the comfort of their bodies, and their favorite part of the day is often snack time or mealtime. When they interact with other children, they usually have a harmonizing effect; often they are content to just sit and watch. These children are very comforted by routine and rhythm; they are hard to get started, but they are equally hard to change, so loyalty is one of their virtues. Transitions and any kind of change are hard for these children, and they can have as many temper tantrums as the choleric child. Such a child will become engrossed in anything he starts and will keep at something like a painting until the paper has a hole in it! Such a phlegmatic temperament is related to the element of water, with its rhythmical wave action that goes on and on without tiring.
A third type of temperament appears in the child who is almost always bright and happy. He or she is usually very cheerful, with tears changing to laughter as quickly as they appear. This child seems to barely touch the ground, and in fact can be observed to walk on the toes much of the time. These children can be very easy to parent; the difficulty in the elementary grades is in getting them to finish their work. Their interest is so ephemeral that they're like butterflies flitting from one thing to the next. They are quick and observant and enthusiastically rush into things, but tend to lack follow-through. They are so aware of sense impressions that they are easily distracted by each new thing. This sanguine temperament is related to the quality of air, which is light and always changing.
To round out our description of the four temperaments, picture a child who is often very inward, more involved in his or her own emotional world than in external action. This kind of child is not so easy to spot in early childhood, because most young children seem to be happy much of the time, but as they grow older, such children seem to take everything personally and experience a great deal of personal suffering (for example, because someone doesn't like him, or because one child didn't give her a valentine). Crying at his or her birthday party is often typical of this child. The positive side of this temperament is a very compassionate and caring nature, but the negative side is extreme sensitivity, as they are more caught up in their own reactions than in what is actually happening. They tend to live in the past, to contemplate their thoughts, memories, and emotional reactions, and they never forget or let go of something. This melancholic temperament is related to the element of the earth, offering resistance to what is happening; but, like geode stones with shining crystals inside, such people have a rich inner life of thoughts and feelings and can be very caring.
Knowledge of the temperaments is an invaluable tool for parents and teachers because it can increase our understanding and compassion for someone who is different from ourselves. A person's temperament changes from childhood to adulthood in characteristic ways, and anyone interested in this fascinating area is encouraged to read Steiner's The Four Temperaments. (26)
My husband and I don't go to church, but we want to do something with our child in terms of religious instruction or upbringing. We don't just want to send her off to Sunday school, but what can we do that is meaningful and appropriate?
Having children usually brings up questions about your own experiences with religion as a child, your current spiritual orientation, and what you (both) want for the children. Many times children lead parents back into a relationship with the religion of their childhood, which they rediscover with new depth and meaning. Because the expression of spiritual beliefs is so individual, I encourage you and your partner to discuss them together and work toward finding or creating an appropriate expression of your beliefs that is suitable for your children as they grow.
It is our job as parents to acclimatize the child to this new land, this new condition of life on earth, but to do this in such a way that the child is not driven into forgetfulness of his or her true origin and ultimate goal. How can we help our children develop their innate religious sense? How can we feed their spiritual hunger? How can we assist them in developing their spiritual nature? These questions are addressed in The Spiritual Hunger of the Modern Child, a compilation of ten lectures by notable speakers representing a variety of religious perspectives, including Judaism, Christianity, Subud, and Buddhism. (27) In great depth the writers discuss the nature of children, the effect of the home environment, the use of prayer, the power of attraction, heredity, and conscience.
All of the writers agree that who you are and what you do around young children are more important than religious dogmas or indoctrination. Reviewer René Knight-Weiler summarized the book's common theme thus: "Religion must be caught, not taught, and indeed it cannot be caught from someone who doesn't truly have it. It will be caught through practice, feeling, symbolism, image and spirit in the home. (28)
In one of the essays, the Reverend Adam Littleton of the Christian Community speaks on the ideas of Rudolf Steiner and echoes the theme that the real work of early childhood is work on oneself: "That is really the fundamental thing to satisfy the spiritual hunger of the child—that the grown-up does not stop working upon himself, that no day does he stop working on himself." (29)
Joseph Chilton Pearce, in Magical Child Matures, (30) emphasizes this same theme: in order for the child to be whole, he must have a model who is whole. While none of us qualifies as a fully realized human being (and our children must know this!), our striving, efforts, awareness, and yearning communicate to the child and are far more valuable than either complete materialism or sanctimonious piety, both of which children can see through and reject as false.
Sanctuaries of Childhood, by Shea Darian, and her book Living Passages for the Whole Family together provide a rich foundation for developing ways to honor and celebrate the spiritual in family life. (31) Principles to keep in mind include not calling on the intellect or giving moral exhortations but instead providing stories and images that awaken in the child a feeling for the holidays or the qualities one is trying to convey.
Because of the imitative nature of the young child, the child's experiences during any kind of Sunday school will have a deeper effect than the words that are spoken, just as who you are and what you do speak more clearly than your words. Thus it is important to give attention to the quality of this experience in your church, temple, or mosque. Is there an atmosphere of calm and warmth in the early childhood classes? Do the activities and methods fit the nature of the young child? You may find that you have to become a teacher yourself!
According to Steiner, the imitative nature of the young child has a spiritual basis. In speaking of the young child, he says:
He is still filled with the devotion that one develops in the spiritual world. It is for this reason that he gives himself up to his environment by imitating the people around him. What then is the fundamental impulse, the completely unconscious mood of the child before the change of teeth? This fundamental mood is a very beautiful one, and it must be fostered in the child. It proceeds from the assumption, from the unconscious assumption, that the whole world is of a moral nature. (32)
The child gives himself over to the people and objects of the world with the assumption that they are good and then imitates them. Steiner states:
The child is completely given up to his environment. In adult life the only parallel to this devotion is in religion, expressed in the soul and spirit of man. . . . [The adult's] own soul and spirit are given up to the divine spirit of the world. The child gives up his whole being to his environment. In the adult the activities of breathing, digestion and circulation are within himself, cut off from the outside world. In the child all these activities are given up to his environment and are therefore by nature religious. This is the essential feature of the life of the children between birth and the change of teeth; his whole being is permeated by a kind of "natural-religious" element, and even the physical body is in a religious mood. (33)
In another lecture, Steiner clarifies:
It is not the soul of the child that is given up to the environment, but its blood circulation, its breathing activities and processes of nourishment through the food it takes in. All these things are given up to the environment. The blood circulation, the breathing and the nourishment processes are praying to the environment. Naturally, such expressions seem paradoxical, but in their very paradox they present the truth. (34)
If we observe such a thing with our whole being and not with the theoretical intellect, then we will develop an attitude or mood in being with young children that Steiner calls "priestly." Thus parents, child care providers, and early childhood teachers are like "caretakers of the divine" as they recognize divinity in the child and introduce him or her to earthly life through the sacred qualities of rhythm, beauty, and love. Although I feel it is beneficial to recognize the importance of our role with young children, I am the first to admit the shortcomings in my attitudes and actions in bringing up my own children and in being with young children in many given moments. However, we not only try to do the best we can, but we can also strive to do better, for the most important work of the parent with young children is inner work on oneself. The young child trustingly accepts us as perfect and good; once he becomes older and sees our imperfections, the most important thing is that the child sees we are striving to do better. Our desire for inner growth (or our complacency) is perceived by the child and has a very deep effect on him.
How can we help the child's natural development of religious feeling? Because the child is so given over to the environment, we help the child by furthering an attitude of gratitude in ourselves and hence in the child for all that the world gives us. Steiner explains:
If he sees that everyone who stands in some kind of relationship to him in the outer world shows gratitude for what he receives from this world; if, in confronting the outer world and wanting to imitate it, the child sees the kind of gestures that express gratitude, then a great deal is done towards establishing in him the right moral human attitude. Gratitude is what belongs to the first seven years of life. (35)
Reverence is another attitude important to foster in early childhood. Steiner explains how this quality transforms:
If one observes children who, by a right upbringing, have developed a natural reverence for the grownups in their surroundings, and if one follows them through their various stages of life, one can discover that their feelings of reverence and devotion in childhood are gradually being transformed during the years leading to old age. As adults such persons may have a healing effect upon their fellowmen so that by their mere presence, or through the tone of their voice, or perhaps by a single glance they can spread inner peace to others. Their presence can be a blessing because as children they have learned to venerate and to pray in the right way. No hands can bless in old age, unless in childhood they have been folded in prayer. (36)
However, qualities such as reverence and prayer cannot be taught to a young child through doctrine or exhortation. They must live within the parents. If prayer is a living reality for the mother or father, then he or she can communicate that to the child and teach him, through example, about prayer. Think about your own childhood. What experiences brought you closer to the Divine? Which people seemed to have a special quality? Looking at spiritual questions can be another great gift that your children bring to you.
RECOMMENDED RESOURCES
Health and Illness
- The practice of medicine directly inspired by Steiner's work has developed more extensively in continental Europe, with fewer practitioners in North America. These doctors and nurses work out of an inner effort to understand the entire human being and the meaning of illness, utilizing many things in addition to standard techniques: nutrition, massage, painting, eurythmy, sculpture, music, baths, herbal oils, and so forth. Further reading about this approach can be found in: A Guide to Child Health, by Dr. Michaela Glöckler and Wolfgang Goebel (Floris Books).
- An Introduction to Anthroposophical Medicine: Extending the Art of Healing, by Victor Bott, M.D. (SteinerBooks).
- Lilipoh. A quarterly journal providing a forum for many different kinds of healing therapies, including anthroposophical medicine. See www.lilipoh.org.
- Physicians' Association for Anthroposophical Medicine (PAAM). Provides information and a directory of physicians. See www.paam.net.
- When a Child Is Born, by Wilhelm zur Linden, M.D. (Thorsons). Information on dealing with childhood illnesses.
Immunizing Your Children
- "Childhood Illnesses, Vaccination, and Child Health," and other articles by Philip Incao, M.D., an anthroposophical doctor. See www.philip incao.com.
- A Guide to Child Health, by Michaela Glöckler and Wolfgang Goebel (Floris Books). Considers childhood illnesses and immunizations from the view of anthroposophical medicine.
- The Immunization Resource Guide, by Diane Rozario (Patter). An annotated listing of nearly everything in print concerning "where to find answers for all your questions about childhood immunizations." Available from Amazon.
- The National Vaccine Information Center. A national nonprofit organization dedicated to public education. Numerous publications and legislative alerts. At www.nvic.org.
- Vaccination: The Issue of Our Times. Articles, research, references, and resources by physicians, public health workers, and parents from Mothering magazine. See www.mothering.com.
- The Vaccination Dilemma, edited by Christine Murphy (SteinerBooks).
- Your County Health Department. Start here and proceed to the state health department, if necessary, to receive the official information on immunizations, risks, and legal requirements. Be sure to ask about exemptions and immunization registries as well.
Media and Children
- Amusing Ourselves to Death, by Neil Postman (Viking).
- The Child and the Machine: How Computers Put Our Children's Education at Risk, by Alison Armstrong and Charles Casement (Key Porter Books).
- Endangered Minds: Why Children Can't Think and What We Can Do About It, by Jane M. Healy, Ph.D. (Simon & Schuster).
- Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect Our Children's Minds— for Better and Worse, by Jane M. Healy, Ph.D. (Simon & Schuster).
- Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, by Jerry Mander (Harper Collins).
- The Plug-In Drug, by Marie Winn (Penguin).
- Unplugging the Plug-In Drug, by Marie Winn (Penguin).
- Who's Bringing Them Up? by Martin Large (Hawthorn Press).
Religious Life
- In the Light of a Child, by Michael Burton (SteinerBooks). Fifty-two verses for children inspired by Rudolf Steiner's Calendar of the Soul.
- Living Passages for the Whole Family: Celebrating Rites of Passage from Birth to Adulthood, by Shea Darian (Gilead Press).
- Prayers for Parents and Children, by Rudolf Steiner (SteinerBooks).
- The Radiant Child, by Thomas Armstrong (Theosophical Publishing House).
- Sanctuaries of Childhood: Nurturing a Child's Spiritual Life, by Shea Darian (Gilead Press).
- The Spiritual Hunger of the Modern Child: A Series of Ten Lectures, by John G. Bennett et al. (Claymont Communications).
NOTES
- Elkind, The Hurried Child, and Elkind, Miseducation.
- Healy, Failure to Connect, p. 110.
- Todd Oppenheimer, "The Computer Delusion," Atlantic Monthly, July 1997, pp. 45—62.
- Healy, Failure to Connect, p. 133.
- Rudolf Steiner, from a course of lectures delivered in Oxford, England, in the summer of 1922, quoted in Grunelius, Early Childhood Education, p. 43.
- Rudolf Steiner, Human Values in Education, lectures delivered in Arnheim, Switzerland, July 17—24, 1924 (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1971), p. 55.
- John Rosemond, "Children and Television," Boston Globe, January 3, 1984.
- Audrey McAllen, "Movement or Television," Bulletin of the Remedial Research Group (Fair Oaks, CA: Rudolf Steiner College, n.d.).
- Rosemond, "Children and Television."
- 10'. Healy, Failure to Connect, p. 32.
- Ibid., pp. 112-15.
- Ibid., pp. 114—15.
- Marie Winn, The Plug-In Drug (New York: Viking, 1985).
- Study by BJK&E Media Group of Manhattan, reported in David Bauder, "Children Today Watching More and More TV, Study Shows," Ann Arbor News, December 30, 1997.
- Education Week, February 14, 1996, p. 32; quoted in Healy, Failure to Connect, p. 104.
- Karen Kaplan, "Army, Hollywood to Co-star in Research," Sacramento Bee, August 18, 1999, p, A4.
- Healy, Failure to Connect, p. 180.
- Robert W. Kubey, letter to the editor, New York Times, December 25, 1997,
- Healy, Failure to Connect, pp. 158—59.
- See Otto Wolff, "Childhood Diseases as a Source of Development," Weleda News 4 (1983): 14-15.
- Dr. Uwe Stave, "Reflections on Fever in Childhood," Journal for Anthroposophy 42 (Autumn 1985): 9.
- Ibid., p. 10.
- In addition to Western allopathic medicine, other systems such as homeopathy, naturopathy, and anthroposophical or ayurvedic medicine also can provide helpful approaches.
- zur Linden, When a Child Is Born, pp. 163—64.
- T. Berry Brazelton, Infants and Mothers: Differences in Development (New York: Dell, 1986).
- Rudolf Steiner, The Four Temperaments (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 2008).
- John. G. Bennett et al., The Spiritual Hunger of the Modern Child: A Series of Ten Lectures (Charles Town, WV: Claymont Communications, 1984).
- René Knight-Weiler, Spiritual Mothering Journal, Summer 1986, pp. 28—29.
- Ibid.
- Joseph Chilton Pearce, Magical Child Matures (New York: Bantam, 1986).
- Shea Darian, Sanctuaries of Childhood (Phoenix, AZ: Gilead Press, 2011) and Living Passages for the Whole Family (Phoenix, AZ: Gilead Press, 2008).
- Rudolf Steiner, Study of Ivlan (London: Anthroposophic Press, 1947), p. 138.
- Rudolf Steiner, The Roots of Education (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1968), pp. 37-38.
- Rudolf Steiner, The Essentials of Education (London: Rudolf Steiner Press, 1948), p. 29.
- Steiner, Human Values in Education, p. 125.
- Rudolf Steiner, The Renewal of Education (Forest Row, UK: Steiner Schools Fellowship Publications, 1981), p. 65.
Bibliography - You Are Your Child's First Teacher