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Health & Well-Being
By Barbara Bedingfield
Pushing children too quickly toward adulthood may be detrimental to their physical and emotional health.
Aside from trying to protect children from toxins in the environment, harmful additives in foods, and lead in toys parents need to become conscious of more insidious dangers that threaten the health of children.
The Loss of Childhood This may seem like an exaggerated claim, but I refer you to Dr. David Elkind's books, Preschoolers at Risk, The Hurried Child and All Grown Up and No Place to Go. Elkind presents startling information about how children are being placed under tremendous pressures to achieve too much too soon. Neil Postman echoes this claim in The Disappearance of Childhood. Young children are being rushed off to enrichment classes rather than being allowed to unfold their capabilities according to Nature's timetable. Public schools no longer incorporate recess, that time of the day that allowed children to play freely and experience a great release from concentrated mental work. The childhood games that have been passed from generation to generation are being lost. Children wear grown-up looking designer clothes. They are turned into companions by divorced parents. The boundary between the adult and the child is blurred with children receiving information about the world and grown-up matters long before they are old enough to handle it. Children are forced to begin learning to read before the left side of the brain has matured at age seven. The wholesome play kindergarten is a thing of the past in most schools.
Allow children to be children. They need to play actively and to be protected from the modern pop culture that seeks to rush them through childhood and turn them into consumers.
Warmth Children need warmth in order to grow properly into their bodies. Their inner organs and limbs need to be protected from the cold. Parents give up too easily when children cry, "But I'm not cold," and they are allowed to dress improperly - with legs, arms and midriffs exposed to the elements or to indoor frigid air conditioning. Parents must serve as the child's ego and insist on adequate clothing. Dressing in layers is practical because children don't feel as hampered in their movements as they do with coats and jackets on. Rudolf Steiner, founder of Waldorf education, warns of diseases that appear later in life when the organs have not been properly protected in childhood.
But there is another aspect of warmth that is necessary for a child's healthy incarnation and that is the warmth of human relationship, warmth that embodies affection, patience, undivided attention, and interest. Too many children today are experiencing the cold of the media as a replacement for familial relationship, not to mention the anger and frustration of stressed adults, the coldness of an empty house after school and the sharp, impatient reprimands that erode self esteem. We should imagine ourselves, whether parent, teacher, friend or just an interested adult as surrounding all children with a loving mantle of warmth expressed through our voices, our gestures, our interest and our reverence for the child.
Sleep Growing children need 10 to 12 hours of sleep each night. Even though parents admit that they see a great difference in children when they are sleep deprived, we see Little League teams practicing at night and children being dragged through Wal-Mart at all hours. Many children watch television at night, carrying images and sounds into their sleep life that affect the quality of their sleep. Teachers certainly notice when children have little vitality for
Rhythm in Life Look at the rhythm in the outer world: night follows day, the tides come and go, the seasons cycle through the year. The earth breathes in and contracts in the winter, the earth breathes out and expands in the summer. Having rhythm in a child's life is akin to Nature's rhythms. Children need times when they are expansive, freely playing and breathing out, balanced with times when they are gathered in and quiet. They do best when they have a predictable routine set by their parent - a time to go to bed, a time to get up, a time to eat (preferably with everyone sitting at the table, conversing and not watching TV) a time to help with housework chores, a time to be quiet and restful. Some children are unable to bring themselves to stillness and quiet. Perhaps it is because they never experience the restfulness of a quiet house without the blare of a television or a radio. They are bombarded with "music" in almost every place of business, with the sounds of lawnmowers, grass blowers, vacuum cleaners, refrigerators, traffic roar and boom boxes. It is no wonder that their nerves are frazzled. Rhythm gives strength. Adults must provide children with this rhythmic balance between activity and rest, between quiet and noise, between taking in and breathing out.
Premature Academics Americans are suffering from too much anxiety over whether their children will learn and succeed in school. This fear-based anxiety has brought the idea that the sooner children begin to read and deal with abstract information, the better off they are. Over-anxious parents rush out to buy flash cards for infants and highly touted software programs for young children. Kindergartens no longer have a playhouse corner with dolls, tables and chairs and cookware. Creative play, recognized by researchers as a vital part of childhood, is considered non-essential. All play must be "educational," rather than play for play's sake. The rosy cheeked, rounded child who lives in a dreamy world of childhood is disappearing and in her place are wan, thin children, awakened in the intellect so early that they neither know how to play nor even seem to want to. They are more comfortable in the adult world. Their intellectual cleverness is highly valued while their childhood needs are ignored.
Waldorf kindergartens provide a stronghold of protection for the young child, a place where children can immerse themselves in fantasy, song, verse, play, story, rhythm, and nature - all of the natural elements of childhood. Unless a child has a specific learning disability, he will learn to read all in good time. But if children are forced to read before they are developmentally ready, reading is far more difficult that it needs to be. Abstract education devoid of art, music and movement is causing burnout in children as early as third grade. Too much of the wrong thing brought too soon and in the wrong way is affecting the health of our children as they suffer from stomach aches, eye strain, and stress that should have no part in their young lives.
The Real World When teachers in Waldorf schools insist that children stay away from television, videos and computers, at least during the week, they are accused of not living in the real world. To the contrary, our reason for opposing the media in children's lives is that we want them to experience the real world and not the mediated world presented on a flat screen - the great outdoors, birds singing, breezes blowing on the cheeks, trees inviting them to climb, splashing of water, radiating sunlight, fragrant smells. We want them to experience real human beings who see them, touch them, listen to them, laugh with them and comfort them - not the cold lifeless images of the TV screen. We want them to move in their limbs, to climb, run, jump, crawl, hop, skip, swim and swing. Children who watch television, even for a short time daily, are filled with the images that come at them, so filled that they are unable to create their own inner images, a capability that is necessary for reading, for writing, for thinking, for creating. When children are given the option of television watching, that is exactly what they do - watch. They become heavy limbed, they lack initiative, they don't learn how to play and entertain themselves, they are over stimulated and this stimulation is so unmanageable for some children that they literally "bounce off the walls" after watching. Give kids a shovel and permission to dig a hole somewhere in the back yard and you will be amazed at the energy, the creativity, the cooperation, the focus and the joy! At our school, at least during some part of the year, children always discover the fun of digging a hole in the play yard. We teachers don't even suggest it. We let them discover it on their own. Never is the play so whole, so natural, and so harmonious.
Look, really look at your children. If they are lethargic, scattered in their thought life, unable to play and to amuse themselves, suffering from school stress, nervously hyperactive, irritable, unable to complete a task, whining, demanding, wan, thin, uncoordinated - think about the information provided in this article. Healthy children are happy, active, calm, able to play, interested in the real world, bright eyed and rosy cheeked, rounded and graceful in movement, full of energy, willing to do their part and respectful toward adults.
It's a pretty simple recipe I have presented - time to be a child, enough sleep, a rhythm in the day, the warmth of caring adults, freedom from premature academics, living in the real world. But it requires as much, if not more, of the adult than being vigilant about good nutrition and a healthful environment. It requires more consciousness, a willingness to question what our society is doing to children, and the acceptance of the mantle of loving parental authority and common sense.
About the writer... Barbara Bedingfield is a kindergarten teacher and one of the founders of the Suncoast Waldorf School. She serves on the Board of Trustees and the Governance Council as Chair of the Faculty. Barbara received her Bachelor's degree in Education from the University of Florida and a Master's Degree in Early Childhood from Antioch University New England. Barbara has been teaching children of all ages for 21 years including two years in Liberia, West Africa with the Peace Corp. Barbara was also one of the founders of The Children's Place, an alternative school in Clearwater and taught there from 1973 to 1980.
To learn more about the Suncoast Waldorf School you can visit their website at:
http://www.suncoastwaldorf.org/ SCHOOL OF THE SUNCOAST Phone: (727) 786-8311
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schoolwork. Children do not have an inner body clock that lets them know when they need to stop and rest. Their impulse is to go until they drop. Parents, once again, must be the ego for the child and set a bedtime for them that is as predictable as the sun going down every day. Yes, children can and will stay up until 9:00, 10:00 or 11:00. This does not mean that it is healthy for a child to do so. (It is also not healthy for an adult relationship between husband and wife to never have any time alone when the children are not around.) Develop a bedtime routine that is predictable and calming. A candle lit, a verse said, a little song sung, a story read - these can make bedtime a pleasure if adults don't allow this ritual to be turned into a never ending marathon. Be the adult. Set the bedtime. Create the ritual. Don't be manipulated. And see the difference in your child when she is not sleep deprived.Copyright © WTCB- Women Taking Care of Business, Inc. ® All Rights Reserved See Terms of Use for this website |