Monthly Archives: April 2010

Renewal: Commit Yourself to Gentle Discipline

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During this forty days of renewal,  re-commit yourself to gentle discipline!

Look  at your child as this small being who has a completely different consciousness than an adult and work with that child to guide that child and leave everyone’s dignity intact.  Small  children really don’t look at things the same way that you do as an adult, because they do not have logical reasoning.  No matter how verbal they are, they still have a different consciousness than you do as an adult if they are small. 

You are the leader, the guide, on this journey because you have more years of living.    Commit yourself to looking at discipline as guiding instead of punishing.  You are trying to raise a capable, responsible, loving, compassionate adult.  Please do not give them a childhood that lands them distanced from you, please do not give them a childhood where they feel badly for being a child and being immature and making mistakes because that is what all children are and that is what all children do.

Think of connection and attachment as your number one key to discipline.  There are going to be rough spots, places of disequilbrium as your child grows.   Your child is not you, your child is not the psychological extension of you, and this can be painful as your child grows.  But please don’t mistake the fact that a child can have their own mind, their own will, as something that is horrible that should be broken.  You are there to guide and work with this child, not to break this child!

Here are your helpers in the guiding of a small child under the age of six: (these are in no special order).

1. Connection and attachment

2.  A good rhythm with lots of outside time – hours of outside time a day!

3.  A healthy diet and rest and sleep.

4.  Low stimulation

5.  Less words on your part,  more action, more imaginative phrasing than just a direct verbal command.  I wrote a post on using your words like a paintbrush to paint a picture just a few days ago:  https://theparentingpassageway.com/2010/04/01/talking-in-pictures-to-small-children/

6.  Having the child make restitution for their mistakes if it is fixable

7.  Having realistic expectations for the child’s age.

8.  Warmth toward this child on your part – the more the child is acting out of sorts, the more you need to connect with this child.

9.  The setting of boundaries that are not movable. You can still be gentle and set a boundary.  They are going to push against the rhythm, against the boundary,  and you can still be gentle.

10.  A parental time-out when you need it.

11. Time-in when they need it.  There are quite a few posts on this blog about time-in. 

12.  You taking care of yourself!  A frazzled mommy cannot effectively and gently guide their small child.  Take a breather and slow down. 

13.  The ability to forgive yourself and start over the next minute if you need to.  It is never too late to start over, to collect your child and connect to your child. 

What would you add to this list?  Leave a comment in the box below!

Many blessings,

Carrie

Renewal: Rhythm

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So, we will be taking these forty days between Easter and Ascension as our time to discuss all things related to the renewal of your life and your family culture.  For today, I want to circle back around to rhythm.

I think many Waldorf homeschoolers are feeling this sense of renewal regarding rhythm!    Melisa Nielsen had a lovely post here about “Rhythm Or Routine”: http://waldorfjourney.typepad.com/a_journey_through_waldorf/2010/04/rhythm-or-routine.html .   Everything she says is right on!  I especially liked the part where Melisa talks about developing our own will enough to STAY HOME.  When you have children under the age of eight, it is important that you firmly entrench children in the home.  It is important that they learn how to create their own play and fun at home instead of relying on going, going, going, to stimulate themselves and to change their emotions.

In a family, there is a daily rhythm, a weekly rhythm, and a yearly rhythm.  This is there whether you create it or not, so I feel it is worth it to take an intentional look at these areas along with parenting.

The yearly rhythm is celebrated through the festivals of the year and is seen as a yearly process of in-breath and out-breath. How you implement this is up to you, I find it lovely to celebrate with the liturgical year of our church.

For a weekly rhythm, one must decide how many days a week one is going to go outside of your home/yard/neighborhood (because even if we stay home we still go outside for many hours a day!).  This is important for small children, to be home,  and it is also important in homeschooling once you reach the grades..  If you are interested in homeschooling, I would say it is very difficult, if not impossible,  to throw homeschooling on top of a completely chaotic flow of events to the day, and also on top of a chaotic house that is cluttered and dirty.  No, your home does not have to be perfect, we actually live in our houses because we are home!  However, keeping the house up and running is part of the rhythm to it all, and in order to do that, we have to be home.  We need to plan when to get groceries, what to cook,  when to do laundry, when to run errands,  so that not everything is completely last minute.  Therefore, it is never too early, nor too late,  to create a bit of an order or flow that suits your family life.

For a small child, the weekly rhythm includes what PRACTICAL work takes place when and planning on your part regarding HOW they may be included.  In cleaning, can they scrub the bathtub whilst taking a bath?  Can they manually grind a cup of flour to add to more flour to bake bread?  Can they use water to clean the sidewalk whilst you plant flowers? 

For a daily rhythm, this is where one needs to think about the flow of the day for times of in-breath and times of out-breath.  For example, when will rest and meal times will be, and when bedtimes and awake times will be?  If the baby needs a nap, will they sleep in a sling?  If you put them to sleep in a room, where will your older children be and what will they be doing?  When are the outside times and when is it time to tell a story?

But most importantly, how will you show reverence and the sacred parts of life throughout these rhythms of life?  When will there be singing and joy, when will there be silence, when will there be time to go outside and look at one small bug or bird and listen and feel the wind?  Reverence and gratitude is the thread that winds itself through all of these yearly, weekly, and daily rhythms. 

Many blessings during these forty days of renewal,

Carrie

More About Easter in the Waldorf Home

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Mrs. Marsha Johnson wrote about this on her list, for those of you who are not members of list, please go sign up here:  waldorfhomeeducators@yahoogroups.com.  This is a lovely perspective on celebrating Easter in the Waldorf Home, even if you are not Christian. 

Here is what Mrs. Johnson wrote:

“As Easter approaches, many people begin to wonder about the role of this festival in their homes….memories of traditional religious practices resurface, concerns about melding two streams of traditions often arise, we wonder about the seemingly cruel aspects to the Christian history of Jesus, affixed to the cross of wood, a far more violent and cruel story than any Grimm’s tale, really.

How do we, as parents and adults in 2010, recognize the fundamental need for the sacred in our lives, in our children, in our communities? A need as deep as hunger, as real as weather, as great as other basic human needs.
Many turn to the voracious maw of the commercial devils, waiting with open grasping bony fingers to take attention and focus into their own mad schemes of materialism and self-gratification…buying gifts, buying toys, buying or even making a literal mountain of things to add into the already present mountain of things that occupy every square inch of giant Mc-Mega style homes. Store windows, mail order, on line, shopping screams at us to purchase our festival happiness and then we sit, in the discarded packaging, wondering where the Normal Rockwell moment went.

Children need to feel the divine, to see the sacred, to experience the feeling that reverence has value, that we can ‘perceive’ the invisible power of the cosmos, that we are held indeed by the larger impossibly infinite unknown, the sacred.

 

How can you help your children, your class, your community to feel this sacred allowance, this space dedicated to the ‘temple’, the room that has been allotted and set aside for the ‘shrine’? Shall we rise above the commercial and the material and create a real home for the sacred in our festivals and in our homes?

 
Yes, we can do this. We can take a small table and cover it with the seasonal colors, for Easter, using soft chick yellows and golds, along with fresh lily purples and whites, and we can drape that small table and add a few elements that remind us of the events hand, times remembered, perhaps a few small wooly lambs, or carefully made beeswax lilies with green leaves, a small vase with a few easter egg bright tulips, some small dishes filled with dirt and wheat grass planted, and a candle, rising, in a small candle holder…here we can place a tiny dish of thorns perhaps taken from the rose bush, along with a few hips left over, bright red, from last fall, that help us visually recall that nothing comes without great striving and challenges in this life, nothing is sewn together without a few pokes from a sharp sticker, we can accept this situation in a visual sense without lengthy verbosity, feeling inherently that the soft wooly lambs and chicks recognize the sharp thorns of the rose….

Creating a special space, and then before supper, to gather in the soft dusky time of eve, to stand before this space and light the candle and quietly speak of old Easters, remembered customs, those people who made it all happen, how it was to find a hand made sugar egg with a scene inside on the table every Easter morning, how it was to rise before sunrise to go to the service on the hill in the dark, how it felt to sit with the Passover table and how grand-dad made everyone laugh with his antics, how sweet the dishes were, how the country home or the city apartment resonated with our love and those loved ones, now out of sight and away in the starry heavens…

Besides the sacred table or corner, you can also create some rhythms with routines that fill that need in your family during these special times of year: a walk through a deep forest at a certain time, a visit to a recognized holy space or shrine, a grotto, a labyrinth, a special geographic location that has meaning in the greatest sense of the world. Holding hands in a circle and saying aloud a small prayer, a verse, a song, a poem, giving space to individual contributions and allowing children to really feel part of such a ceremony will have positive life long consequences.

Bringing love and light to the children, even for a few minutes, is just as important in parenting as are food, shelter, clothing, encouragement, guidance, financial support, and so on. Doing nothing is really a kind of deprivation in my point of view. Take responsibility as the parents of that child or those children and make some decisions about your plan to provide for the sacred and then commit to those traditions and keep them alive for your dear ones.

Not much, really, to do as some kind of onerous task. Just gathering, holding hands, lighting a candle and a simple verse, can allow the child to feel closely held by the eternal arms of the sacred.
Mrs M

Hope you enjoyed that perspective!”

I added the bolded areas; and I hope you too enjoyed that.  It is worth contemplating for the next 40 days, this time of renewal between Easter and Ascension:  what is your spiritual path? How do you show this to your children?  How is the sacred manifested in your life?

Many blessings,

Carrie

Talking In Pictures To Small Children

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A small child under the age of seven needs to hear you paint a picture with your words instead of a direct command.  This can really be a very difficult thing for us to do as adults, and as such we find ourselves barking commands (politely, of course :)) at our small children all day long.  “Come to breakfast!”  “Use the potty!”  “Get your shoes on!” “Now please!”  “Stop doing that!”  Even if we frame things positively and say what we do want, the point is that a million times a day we are asking our child to do something.  And when we only use a command, we are essentially giving the small child a chance to think, a chance to decide their behavior, and then we get angry when they don’t do what we want when we want it.  How funny how that goes.

Small children are often in a fantasy, imaginative world much of the day as they play and create games.  They are not adults, they do not view time as adults do, they do not have the sense of urgency that you do.  And nor should they.

A small child lives in the physical realm and in their bodies.  So, to most effectively parent, we must reach to that for the small child as often as possible instead of playing commander, or worse yet, trying to drive the car with our horn by yelling at the small child. 

Here are some examples:

  • Think of animals that involve what you need.  Can the child hop like a bunny, run as fast as a roadrunner bird, swim like a fish?  Can they open their big  crocodile mouths to have all those teeth brushed?  Can you be a bear that needs a big winter coat ?  (And as you say this, you help put the child’s arm into the coat)….It is the imaginative movement plus the physical piece that gets it all done.
  • Can you involve their dolls or their imaginary friends?   Quietly take their favorite doll and start to get it ready for bed and sing to the doll. “ You and Tim (the imaginary friend) can sit right for dinner “( and lead the child by the hand to the table).
  • Can you employ gnomes, fairies, giants, leprechuans?  Today a four- year- old and I looked for leprechuan shoes by my back door….  Oh, look at these leprechuan shoes sitting here, do these fit YOU?  Oh my, look at the turned up toes on your shoes, I wonder if those shoes will lead you to a pot of gold!  How about gnomes exploring the mouth cave for teeth brushing?  Big giant steps to settle into a big giant bed?

You do not have to do this to the point where it is tiring to you, but do try here and there, because I find most parents employ very little imagination with their children during the day and the children really do respond to it well and do just what needs to happen.

Your part though, is to plan enough time so things are NOT rushed.  Rushing is the death of imagination and the beginning of stress.  Please plan ahead! 

Also, rhythm is your friend.  It is in that space to help you and your child.  If you do something different every night to get ready for a meal, to get ready for bed, what cues does your child have for when things are going to happen?  Again, their sense of time and urgency is not that of an adult.  Also, please seriously evaluate how many places you are dragging a small child.  Are these places for them or errands and would your child just rather be home?   I am just asking you to consider this piece of the puzzle; only you know the answer for you and your family. 

The last piece is the physical end of it, DOING something with a child whilst using the imagination and movement goes much better!  Yes, it is tiring that that is what small children need.  But better to do that than to complain and moan and groan that your small child, who is perfectly  normal, is “not listening”. 🙂

Try it out, I think you will find life to be much easier. 

Many blessings,

Carrie

How To Make A Decision About Homeschooling

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It is that time of year…the time when parents start to think about homeschooling!  Contracts may be due back at private school, or you may be interested in not sending your child to school next year.  You have thought about homeschooling, read some things on the Internet, but you are still deciding.

I am very pro-homeschooling.  Specifically,  I am very pro Waldorf homeschooling, bur  this is directed toward anyone investigating homeschooling, no matter what method they intend to use (although you may see my leanings come out here and there, LOL!)

1.  Find out the laws in your state!  Many times parents are panicked about “homeschooling” their small children, only to find out the law in their state says that compulsory schooling starts at age six or something.  You need to know the laws, how to file for homeschooling, what the requirements are and if you really need to be doing anything other than living together at all!

2.  If you don’t know what method you are going to use to homeschool, you must investigate.  Go to your library, or on-line and look at ALL the options.   Really understand what drives some of these methods if their is an underlying philosophy, and look BEYOND the Kindergarten years if you only have small children.      Homeschool is NOT about re-creating a classroom in your house (although some people do!)…There are many, many advantages to homeschooling and using the home as a learning environment – things can be much more practical and hands-on than in a classroom.  You can involve a lot of cooking, gardening, building, hands-on science.  Please do, (and this is just  my basis coming out, so fair warning), think about more than just worksheets or “school in a box” or “a math program.”  Think about human development, think about a holistic approach.

3.  Understand that if your child is coming home from school OR if you are switching homeschooling methods, it can take six months (or some estimates say two months for every month your child was in school even!) to really relax into homeschooling.  So my advice is to start SIMPLE, and to plan to time around holidays, family trips, etc.

4.  If you have very small children, consider the approach you want to take carefully and how you feel  about when and how academics  should be introduced.  How do you feel about art, music, movement, nature?  Are these things integral to you and to your child’s development?  Is your approach regarding education more a “fill them up” or “it will unfold with support”? 

5.  Start with establishing a basic rhythm to your home with mealtimes, nap times, bedtimes, outside time, working together – part of schooling at home means helping with meals, cleaning up the house, etc.  Those things are part of school and of life. 

6.  Please, please do understand that the “pre-K” through second grade phase can be pretty relaxed. Look at the standards for your state or neighboring states; skills are just being developed.  I find many parents freak out a bit with their first child (or they have a little person in Kindergarten who thinks they need to keep up with big brothers and big sisters!) and are just not relaxed at all and are much too strict and moving too fast.  Develop depth and flexibility in your teaching.  Learning should be fun!

Please add your suggestions for parents, especially for those with very small children, in the comment box; I would love to hear from you!

Many blessings,

Carrie