Category Archives: Age Three

The Twelve Senses

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I am going to try and synthesize a few things for you all that I recently learned from Donna Simmons at the Waldorf At Home conference held in Atlanta,  a presentation by Daena Ross for Waldorf In the Home (available through Rahima Baldwin Dancy’s on-line store in CD and DVD versions) and Barbara Dewey’s section on the twelve senses in her book “Beyond the Rainbow Bridge”. 

I am by no means an expert on the twelve senses, although I will say the twelve senses make a whole lot of sense to me due to my background as a neonatal/pediatric physical therapist.

Steiner postulated in his lectures that there were not only the five most obvious senses that we think of, but actually twelve senses that required development.  This has been proved in the medical community, although sometimes in medical literature and therapy literature you see reference to “systems” rather than “senses” although they are truly talking about the same thing!

The twelve senses are what unites the inner and outer world of the individual and what allows us healthy interaction with other people at the highest developed levels.  It takes a long time for these senses to be developed, but the foundational senses needed to develop some of the upper senses are most developed in the first seven years.  There we are, back to my soapbox about the first seven years!

The Lower Senses are seen in our will forces, they are unconscious, and they manifest in the metabolic-limbic system.  These include:

The Sense of Touch – through the organ of the skin.  This includes what is inside of me and what is outside of me.  Important ways to boost this foundational sense include vaginal birth, swaddling, holding, positive tactile experiences (NOT PASSIVE experiences, like through media or Baby Einstein! Active experiences!)  The lack of completion of this  sense is strongly related to ADHD according to Daena Ross. 

The Sense of Life or sometimes called The Sense of Well-Being – this encompasses such things as if you can tell if you are tired, thirsty, hungry.  The best way to boost this sense is to provide your children with a rhythm to help support this while it is developing.  Some children have great difficulty recognizing their own hunger or thirst cues, their own need for rest or sleep. A rhythm can be a great therapeutic help in this regard.

The Sense of Self-Movement – this is probably more familiar to therapists in some ways as the “proprioceptive system” in some ways.  This sense encompasses the ability to move and hold back movement, and can also encompass such sensory experiences as containment (which can be a form of massage for premature babies) and also swaddling.  Childhood games that involve starting, stopping can also affect this sense.

The Sense of Balance – This is balance in two separate realms, from what I gather from the Daena Ross presentation.  It is not only the ability to balance by use of the semicircular canals of the ears  for midline balance so one can cross midline but also refers to the  balance of life and being able to be centered, which again goes back to rhythm and the idea of in-breath and out-breath.  Donna Simmons calls this one a gateway to The Middle Senses.

The Middle Senses are seen in our feeling lives, involve us reaching out into the world a bit, they are seen as “dreamy” senses and manifesting in the rhythmic system.  THE CHILD HAS NO FILTER TO FILTER THESE SENSORY EXPERIENCES OUT IN THE EARLY YEARS.   In the later years, the arts build these senses, which is why the Waldorf curriculum includes teaching through art in the grades.   These senses  include:

The Sense of Smell –  strongly correlated with memory.  This can be an ally in education of the grades age child, but beware of scented everything when your children are in the foundational first seven years. 

The Sense of Taste – Not only on a physical plane, but an emotional plane in naming experiences (a “putrid” experience, a “sweet” experience)

The Sense of Sight  – with two different ways to visualize something:  one is the ability to distinguish color, and the other is the ability to distinguish form (which Daena Ross says is more related to The Sense of Self-Movement).  The best way to help this sense is to protect the eye from media while developing.  A way to bolster this sense in the grades, but not the Early under 7 Years, is through form drawing.

The Sense of Warmth –   Donna Simmons calls this one a gateway to The Higher Senses.  This sense does not fully develop until age 9 and can literally cause a hardening of creativity and new thought as the child matures, but also can refer to a literal inability of the child to be able to tell if they are hot or cold.  Warmth implies not only physical warmth, but warmth on a soul level.  Joy, humor, love, connection are all important developers of this sense along with PROTECTION from extreme and garish sensory experiences that would cause hardening.  This is a very important sense, and children need help with protecting this sense until the age of 9 or 10, so much longer than many parents think!

The Upper or Higher Senses develop during adolescence and require a strong foundation of The Lower Senses and The Middle Senses to come to maturity.  These senses are associated with awakening of the individual, with being concerned with other people and are seen as being centered in The Head.  These senses include:

The Sense of Hearing (which Daena Ross calls “a bridge between The Middle and Higher Senses” in her presentation)  This requires completion of The Sense of Balance – both of these senses involve the organ of the ear.

The Sense of Speech or The Sense of the Word (this is the speech of another person, not yourself) – Requires completion of The Sense of Self-Movement as you must be able to quiet your own speech in order to really hear another person.

The Sense of Thought or The Sense of Concept (again, of the other person, not your own thoughts!) – Requires completion of  The Sense of Well-Being.  Rhythm builds this ability to quiet oneself in order to hear someone else’s thoughts.

The Sense of  the Individuality of the Other (Donna Simmons also calls this the “I-Thou” relationship of boundaries) – This requires integration and completion of all senses, but particularly involves The Sense of Touch according to Daena Ross. 

The most important take-away point for my parents of children under the age of 7 is that children need rhythm, a balance of in-breath and out-breath and protection of the senses from too much stimulation, from media and boundaries set by the parents to wear clothes (VERY difficult with some little nudists!).  The development of these senses is also profoundly related to sleeping and what occurs during sleep to build all of this up.

Waldorf Education is first and foremost about health and the twelve senses provide a glimpse into some of why things are done in Waldorf the way they are!  I encourage you to investigate the twelve senses on your own.  In this age and day of skyrocketing ADHD/ADD, autism spectrum disorders, sensory processing disorders, this should be mandatory learning for all parents. 

With love,

Carrie

Wonderful Words From Marsha Johnson!

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This post is NOT by me, but by Master Waldorf Teacher Marsha Johnson, who lives in the Portland area.  She wrote this wonderful post this morning, I so encourage you to read it carefully, consider it, weigh it in your heart.  Please do go and join her Yahoo!group waldorfhomeeducators.  This is an excellent post, just excellent.  Please read Marsha Johnson’s wise words and enjoy!

“One recurring thread that emerges again and again in the various home schooling groups is the embracing of Info-Mation as Edu-Cation. This is an approach that relies on the passing along of facts and figures to the children, rather like filling up a blank sheet of paper with a long list of data. This kind of education is one that many parents themselves were exposed to as children in lower schools and is yet embraced by many institutions of higher learning.
I have jokingly referred to it as Information Vomitus. Particularly in graduate school, one absorbs mounds of information and must regurgitate it accurately within a time period, and those who can do this are considered ‘smart’.
As a species, some of us just love this habit. We have game shows where we love to quiz people on obscure and odd facts and see who can answer the most questions correctly. There are board games that focus on this aimless ‘art’, like Trivial Pursuit. That name does make me laugh at least the use of the word trivial. Small and meaningless.

As parents, we tend to veer unconsciously towards teaching our children in the way we ‘were taught’. This tendency is really one of the most dangerous and damaging stage in the life of the homeschooling family.

Why do I say this? Because the children of today, the millennial children, the Shining Ones, are very different than the previous generation of children, those born from the 1950s to the 1990s, when the Information Age really began to dominate. The idea was strewn about that one could improve a child’s IQ with exposure to this Factoid Education and that children were really blank slates whose minds could be sharpened and very soon after this time period began we started seeing massive testing of children as large population groups and lo and behold, a lot of stereotyping also began to show up in the statistics. All sorts of rather wicked and demeaning conclusions have been drawn from this kind of erroneous practice.

When we begin to ‘school’ children, and some are so anxious they start right away as soon as Baby can focus her eyes, we reach back into our own educational experiences and most often pull forward this kind of teaching that involves a lot of child sitting-parent speaking.

With a sense of humor here, often the children quickly teach the parent that this kind of education isn’t going to persist for too long. As children are naturally good and sweet and want to make us big people happy, they often accommodate us with love and grace, and put up with quite a bit of this kind of dreary boring presentation.

But some don’t. They rise up and run about and wiggle away, dancing, singing, going outside, done-with-that!, let’s have snack happy attitude that is probably the most logically kind response possible.

The type of education that really fits the developmental stage of the child most closely, from my own point of view, is Waldorf education. Within the very ‘bones’ of Rudolf Steiner’s philosophies we find the most wonderful comprehension of how children are, what children need, and why we must approach the education of the child with an imaginative, artistic technique. A warm and inclusive attitude. A whole-child, integrated program that moves smoothly from moment to moment to create a kind of living-dream, wherein the child floats, soars, rests, and grows.

And this is probably the very opposite of the Info-Mation protocol, which calls mostly on the forces of the nerve-sense pole, the head, the hearing and memory and goes down dry as a desert rock in late summer.

Will you provide an education that inspires your child and yourself? Can you take a subject and find the Alice-In-Wonderland Rabbit Hole that will allow you to enter in a playful and unexpected fashion? How much of the school time is spent sitting and listening, or writing or copying? How much is spent moving, doing, trying, inventing, creating, cooperating, considering, digesting?

I am struck again and again by how passionate and devoted parents can be to a style of learning that would, well, invoke passion and interest in someone 35 years old or older? (smiles here) But a six year old is in his first decade, not the fourth, and taking the dry factual program to this tender age should really be some kind of crime.

Destroying a child’s imagination and tramping through their fairy land of fantasy with the bulldozers of ‘real life’ is actually a crime against childhood. We are surrounded by immense pressure from commercial marketers, manufacturers, media moguls, and those who want to benefit from premature aging. It is unbelievable, a very sophisticated and invisible force to destroy childhood and create an endless period of ‘tween’ and ‘teen’. Did you know the average age of video game players is actually 29 years old? This means there many older and younger right around 30 years of age who devote most of their free time to staring at screens.

One of the easiest ways to judge how a lesson is being received is to keep a close eye on the recipient. Rather than lose your adult self into the lovely land of facts and transmitting these facts, say a few words and watch the child. Allow for pauses and wait a bit. Does the child keep her attention focused on you, do the cheeks pink up, do the eyes sparkle, doe he sit forwards towards you, hanging on your words? Or does she fidget, grow pale, look down or elsewhere, try to rise and leave? Observe the child closely during the day, during play, during rest, during active vigorous exercise. Learn the color patterns of the child’s skin, the facial and body gestures. Configure your lessons in such a way that the child’s response is one of delight, close attention, desire to participate, and shows a healthy age appropriate expression.

Young children naturally move and use their bodies to learn. Incorporate this into each lesson and every day in your home teaching. Sitting is only one of many types of positions that the young child assumes in the natural exploration of the physical world. Adults tend to sit for the vast majority of each day in both work and play. There is much to be gained from moving often and finding physical ways to enhance the learning experiences.

The old saying `give a man a fish, feed him for a day, teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime’, is a perfect mantra for teaching the young human born in the early 2000s. Consider subject matter from the child’s point of view, figure out what you can do in your lessons that allow the child to use the three elements of self: head, heart, and hands. One of the greatest errors in current educational practice is the sole focus on the head learning, forcing young children to sit at tables for long days, wearying their spirits and graying their outlook. Early academic fatigue syndrome is rampant in our country and fortunately, almost 100 years ago, Rudolf Steiner illuminated a brilliant pathway of education that is more relevant today than ever before. Living artistic age-appropriate lessons, every day, naturally engaging and guaranteed to engender a life long love of learning.

Marsha Johnson, Spring 2009”

Thank you Marsha, for these words that I am holding in my heart,  thank you for being here and sharing with us,

Carrie

Peaceful Life with a Three-Year-Old

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So, after we have discovered all the developmental characteristics from a traditional childhood development standpoint and also a brief look at an anthroposophical view of early childhood development, the questions begs to be asked:  How can I make my house and relationship with my child a peaceful one?

The first thing to do is to start with yourself – your own inner work, your own physical environment and your own health.  You set the tone in your home, and how you respond to your child matters.   You are an Authentic Leader in your home.  For more posts regarding being an Authentic Leader, please see the series of posts I wrote, beginning with this one:https://theparentingpassageway.com/2008/10/16/gentle-discipline-as-authentic-leadership/.  If you hit “no spanking” in the tags section, the rest of the posts in this series will come up.  This is important, as Steiner felt that the education of the small child started with the self-education of the parent, the right thoughts, the right attitude, warmth toward your small child.

Second,  take a serious look at your environment –  is there clutter that is hindering your ability to be peaceful within your own home?  Contrary to popular opinion, Waldorf education is not about having mounds of wooden toys!  Slim down your material objects, have a home for every toy, have ways to set up scenarios for play for your child.

Third, look carefully at your rhythm.  It is a fallacy in our society that three-year olds need stimulation outside of the home.  However, that being said, then you do  need a rhythm within your home in order to carry the three-year old, particularly if the three-year old has no older siblings to help carry the tone.  You will need a rhythm that could include such elements as consistent waking, nap and bedtimes, consistent meal times of warm food, storytelling, music,singing and verses throughout the day as you transition from one activity to another and celebrate the season, plenty of outside time – it is very difficult to settle down and play if you have a lot of energy!!- and time for the child to be (or not) a part of practical work.  This is the time to develop and sharpen your own skills in gardening, baking, cooking, housekeeping, laundry and ironing, knitting, puppet and toymaking.  More than anything, these are the things your child needs to see.  Your child needs to work on being in their bodies.  Stop talking and explaining so much – just do and be.  If you need help with this, please do see my post “Take My Three- Day Challenge”.

Three-year-olds need things to turn into a story, a song, a story about when you were little or they were born, a fantasy activity, a physical activity, but not scientific explanation.  There will be a time and a place for these explanations later, but the time is not now.  Logical thought is not there at age three.  Please save your logical explanations for later when the child is older; it will be so much more warmly appreciated then!

Three-year-olds are interested in being a friend and having a friend, but as we have seen in our previous post, they are not always the best at social skills.  Some would argue children need groups to develop these skills, I would argue that they will mature just fine even without a lot of interaction with their own peers.  It is interesting to me the number of mothers who have told me the pressure they have received from well-meaning family members and friends who told them that their shy child needed social interaction or school  in order to come out of their shell and by the same token their wild child needed more social interaction or school to calm down!  Children will develop well with a solid foundation of being firmly entrenched  in the home and with their own family.

If you are going to have a playdate or playgroup, please consider that a child under the age of 7 is at the height of imitative behavior, so if we have a playdate, arrive and tell the children to just “go play” they have nothing to imitate off of and therefore have difficulty getting things going.  A Waldorf playgroup is always fairly structured for this reason.   How much better to start with some singing, some seasonal verses or fingerplays, and an activity where the adults model good manners, “please” and “thank-you”, taking turns, before the children go off to play.  And please do keep the time short, a three –year old certainly does not need a playdate that stretches out for four hours!

Playdates and playgroups are inevitable really about the mothers who need to get together and talk and get support.  If there is any way you can do this in adult only time after the children go to bed or on a weekend lunch when your family can assist with watching your children, this can be so valuable.  Then the playgroup can be who it should really be about – the child.

If you have a firm rhythm, are firmly rooted in your home, and are bringing stories, music, and practical work to your child along with lots of outside time, then do be assured you are doing exactly what you are supposed to do.  If you are fostering in your child a sense of gratitude for the Earth and all her people and things, you are doing a wonderful job. 

Which, of course, does not always mean that your child will “behave”.  Many attached parents feel like failures when their children hit three or so, as the child’s sense of self and an increased need for boundaries start to come out. As a parent, you cannot count it as a “good day” if your child doesn’t cry or melt-down or not have a temper tantrum… You can count it as a “good day” if you were calm, if you helped to de-escalate the situation, if you held it together. And even then, please be easy with yourself!  Living with small children can be challenging!  This is about the path your child is taking as he or she grows and becomes their own person, this is not about you versus them.

However, the need for boundaries is there at age three.   If the child is hurting themselves or others, if the child is destroying property, if the child is just plain wild and irritating you or others – then the behavior needs to be guided.  In order to do this, you must be calm.  This is not a battle of wills, and if you as a parent think that way, you have already lost sight of what you should be doing as an Authentic Leader. 

Your child needs your calm, warm physical presence and sense of humor to help bring them back into their bodies when they are out of control.  They do not need sarcasm, judgment, guilt, bargaining, or separation to help them.  They need your warmth, your ideas for play, your smiles and hugs and love.  They don’t need a lot of explanation or adult burdens of the world.  Every child has a birthright to have his or her golden age of innocence and time of play and time of wonder.

Parenting a three-year old requires physical perseverance, emotional stability, calm words, creativity and a remembering what it is like to be small and full of wonder.  Cherish each day as your child passes through the stages; it all goes rather quickly,  even on the days when parenting seems like a repetitious, physical challenge.  On those days, call a friend and get some support; come and read the posts on this blog. I hope they are inspiring to you and give you some food for thought.  Talk with your spouse and find some time to have off for even half an hour.  Figure out between you and your spouse how all of you can be receiving enough sleep so you can be at your best.   Set the tone in your home and for your family.

Just a few thoughts from my little corner of the world; please do pass this on to any mothers of three-year-olds that you know!

I welcome your comments and inquiries below.

Three-Year Old Behavior Challenges

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What is life like with a three-year-old?  There is something quite magical about the three-year-old year, and often something quite difficult.  I have had three mothers contact me recently about life with a three-year-old – its ups and its downs..

This is how the Gesell Institute Book “Your Three-Year-Old” characterizes some of the qualities of a three and three and a half year old”

Three Years:

Conforming, decreased physical aggressiveness, happy most of the time, friendly, pleasing

Loves new words

Likes to make a choice within realm of experience

Sure of himself

Tries to meet and understand social demands

Gets along well with mother

Helpful around house

Like to relive babyhood

Beginning of interest in babies, wants family to have one

If sibling is on the way, most really do not understand baby growing inside mother

Expresses affection readily

Desires to look at and touch adults, especially mother’s breasts

Father can take over in many situations, although Mother still favored parent

Child clings less at bedtime and may go to sleep better for father

Usually enthusiastic about other children but still immature in their social reactions

Children may be more comfortable with adults other than other children – they approach adults with requests for help or information

From page 55, “ Much of a child’s conversation with any adult is still self-initiated. He may respond to what grown-ups say to him, or sometimes, he may not.”

Temper tantrums decline

 

Three and a Half Years:

Turbulent, troubled period of disequilibrium, the simples event or occasion can elicit total rebellion

Strong and secure gross motor abilities may turn more into stumbling, falling, at this age

New- found verbal ability “I’ll cut you in pieces!” and lots of whining

Loves silly rhymes and rhyming words, sentence length is increasing, acquiring a large vocabulary

May refuse to do things a lot, or howl and scream, or say a lot of “I can’t” I won’t” kinds of things

Three and a half to four may be the height  for the most “WHY?”  “WHERE?”  “WHAT?” kinds of questions

Demanding, bossy, turbulent, troubled but mainly due to emotional insecurity

Mother-child relationship difficult but may also cling to mother

May refuse to take part in daily routine – may do better with almost anyone than Mother

Inwardized, insecure, anxious

Determined and self willed; emotional extremes predominate

Emotional and physical insecurity

Anxious; lots of tensional outlets such as nose-picking, nail-biting, boys may be pulling almost constantly at their penises,  etc; can see stuttering and tremors of muscles at times, visual strain

May not eat well, may still have problems with bed-wetting, may wake up in the middle of the night and walk around

Afraid of almost anything and everything

Beginning of prolonged play with dolls, house building, tricycle riding

Girls may propose to Daddy at this age

If your child tells you stories, they may have violent elements in them (page 102)

THINGS THREE-YEAR OLDS DO:

Wonder at things!

Play a lot

Invent stories to tell

Talk a lot and ask a lot of questions

Love their mommies and daddies and pets!

Get all those new words and new skills!

THINGS THAT MOTHERS SAY ARE DIFFICULT ABOUT THE THREE-YEAR-OLD:

Whining

Frequent changing of mind

Wanting to play games constantly with mother and wanting her attention all the time

The difficulty that comes with dressing, eating, going to bed, taking a nap

The asking of “Why?” over and over and over

STEINER’S VIEW OF THE THREE –YEAR -OLD

For an anthroposophical view of the three-year-old, let us consider the following.  Rudolf Steiner had much to say about the period of two-and-a-half until age five; this is the age that “an exceptionally vivid memory and wonderful imagination” starts to happen.  He discusses how children continue to live by imitation, and how the best things to do with children between these ages involve anything that invokes imagination.  This is where Waldorf teachers and followers of Steiner start looking toward more open-ended, homemade kinds of toys due to their beauty and warmth and how much the child can add to this out of the child’s own imagination.

Steiner felt that the child of this period “is by  no means in a position to take in ideas which bear on the moral life.  And it follows that he should not be taught to him.”  In the book “Understanding Young Children; Excerpts From Lectures by Rudolf Steiner Compiled for Use of Kindergarten Teachers”, this story is told: “Two disconsolate parents once came to Dr. Steiner and complained that their child, generally very good, had stolen money that the mother had put in the cupboard, bought sweets and distributed them.  Dr.  Steiner explained that [the child] merely copied what [the child] had seen its mother do.  And this had nothing whatever to do with stealing.  The child becomes what its environment is.”

Steiner also discusses how speech is the foundation for thinking, and how physical mobility is the foundation for speech.  Therefore, a child learns to walk, to speak and then to think.  “In the beginning, “Steiner says, “ the child merely repeats the sounds it hears, sounds that are more or less rhythmic and melodious and in accordance with the peculiar relation between its groping arms and legs.  Thinking can only arise out of speech and not before.”

In Steiner’s view, one of the most important things we can do in the first seven years for our children is to teach the child gratitude.  This becomes the basis of love, the virtue belonging to the second seven year cycles, and duty, the basis of the third seven year cycle.

“If [the child] 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 right kind of gesture that express gratitude, then a great deal is done towards establishing in him the right moral human attitude.  Gratitude is what belongs in the first seven years.”

One thing that the Gesell Institute book points out on page 12 is this gem of a sentence, “The first is that, as we have tried to emphasize, even though he may be difficult at times, your child is not your enemy.  It is not you against him.”  They point out that the mother matters most to a three-year-old and is therefore the child is often at his best and worst with his own mother. 

Here it is again – how we are mothers respond to our children and set the tone in our home is a determinant in the lives of our family. It is not whether or not our child “behaves”; it is how we ACT toward our child.  Three is so very, very little.  Please do let your child feel your warmth toward them; it goes a long way at three.  The other piece of advice that can be offered for dealing with three is to not turn things into a personal battle between the two of you…it is not you and your child, it is just “this happens when we do this”, “we must do x in order to do x”. Sing, hum, wonder together, and love one another.   The more peaceful, matter of fact energy you can muster will really help in the day-to-day life with a three-year-old.  The more we can create for our child that sense of wonder at life, gratitude for life, the better laid the foundation is for the rest of the child’s life.

The next post will discuss some tips for more peaceful living with your three-year-old.

One of the 12 Senses: Warmth

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This is an excellent article regarding one of Steiner’s 12 senses that is important developmentally for young children: warmth.

Please check out this link to read a great article on Warmth, Strength and Freedom:  http://tidewaterschool.blogspot.com/2008/12/warmth-strength-and-freedom-by-m.html

Happy, happy reading!!

Just a few thoughts from my little corner of the world.

Take My Three Day Challenge

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For those of you with children under the age of 7, have you ever thought how many times a day you are giving a directive to your child?  Even if it is a positively phrased directive, it is still a directive that causes a child to go up into his head and awakens the child into self-awareness.  Parents and teachers who understand child development from a Waldorf perspective believe that every time we bring a child into self-awareness and into the consciousness of before the seventh year, we are taking away energy that the child should be using for formation of the physical organs.  The belief is that this may not show up as harmful in the child’s life until they are adults.  Even if you do not believe this, I think we can all agree that in this fast-paced world, the stress and strain and viewing the small child as a miniature adult with just less experience is leading to incredible challenges of increased suicide rates and pyschological disorders in the teenaged years and beyond.  Think about how we parent and why we parent is really important!

Parenting is all about looking at the  doing the right thing at the right time within child development.  If you are providing lots of verbal directives to your small child, you are putting the cart before the horse by using a tool that is not really needed until later developmental stages. 

“But what do I use then?”  you cry. “Children need direct instruction!”

Rudolf Steiner did not think so. He wrote in his lecture, “Children Before the Seventh Year,” found in the book Soul Economy, the following passage about the first two and a half years:

“During the first two and a half years, children have a similar rapport with the mother or with others they are closely connected with as long as their attitude and conduct make this possible.  Then children become perfect mimics and imitators.  This imposes a moral duty on adults to be worthy of such imitation, which is far less comfortable then exerting one’s will on children.”

He then goes on to describe the period of the ages from two and a half through age five as one that “can be recognized externally by the emergence of an exceptionally vivid memory and wonderful imagination.  However, you must take great care when children develop these two faculties, since they are instrumental in building the soul.  Children continue to live by imitation, and therefore we should not attempt to make them remember things we choose.”

He ends with a few thoughts about the period from age five to age seven:

“Previously, unable to understand what they should or should not do, they could only imitate, but now, little by little, they begin to listen to and believe what adults say.  Only toward the fifth year is it possible to awaken a sense of right and wrong in children.  We can educate children correctly only by realizing that, during this first seven year period until the change of teeth, children live by imitation, and only gradually do they develop imagination and memory and a first belief in what adults say.”

So, if any of that resonates with you, come along with me and take my three day challenge.  For three days, try to bring a consciousness to the words you choose with your children.  How much chit chat do you do all day with your children?  Can you replace that with peaceful  humming or singing? 

How many directives do you give that could be either carried by your rhythm, done with no words at all (for example, instead of saying, “Now let’s brush our teeth!” could you just hand Little Johnny his toothbrush?) or could your words be phrased in a way that involves fantasy or movement?  For example, if you need your child to sit down at the table to eat, you could ask your baby bird to fly over to the table and sit in its nest.  “Mama Bird has food for you!”  Could you redirect your child into some sort of movement that involves their imagination that would satisfy the need for peace in your home?

Music through singing and the poetry of verses are wonderful ways to provide transitions throughout the day along with the strength of your rhythm.  Many of the old Mother Goose rhymes are fabulous for all parts of the daily routine.  Songs provide a peaceful energy and a needed source of warmth for the young child’s soul.

A mother asked, “What do I do if my child is doing something harmful to me or to another child? Don’t I need to use direct words then?”

I believe this depends on the age and temperament of the child.  As mentioned in other posts, many times the most effective method is to be able to physically move the child away from the situation or to physically follow through in a calm way.  You would never expect your words to be enough in a highly charged emotional situation for a child under 7.  A Complete and Unabridged Lecture on the Harms of Hurting Others is often not what is needed in the moment.

Perhaps in this case, helping the child to make amends after the emotions of the situation have decreased would be a most powerful means to redemption.  When we make a mistake, even an accidental mistake, we strive to make it right.  An excellent lesson for us all, no matter what our age.  We do not let this behavior slide, but we do work toward setting it all right again.

“What about giving my child a warning that an activity will change?  Don’t I need words then?”

If you are at home, your rhythm should carry many of the words you would otherwise use.  There may be older children of five or six that appreciate a warning, again dependent upon their temperament, and there may be some children that think they need to know everything that happens in advance but in reality it only makes them anxious and they talk of nothing else. 

These are all important questions, and perhaps this three day challenge will assist you in sorting out the answers for you and your family as you strive toward a more peaceful home.

Just a few thoughts from my little corner of the world.