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I became interested in Steiner education some years ago after communication from an English friend who lived and worked in a Steiner community.  I was already firmly convinced that other education systems would not meet my child’s needs and had become concerned about where we would educate her.  

Having made the decision together with my husband to use the Waldorf education system, I approached the WCSS to arrange to enrol my daughter.  I then met one of the kindergarten teachers, which remains one of the most humbling experiences of my life.  I was overwhelmed at this woman’s consummate gentleness and her tact in handling a woman who thought she had found the answer to all her problems and was wonderfully eager to begin her daughter’s “education”. She pointed out, ever so gently, as she gazed at my daughter clutching her PB (transitional comfort object in the form of an extremely tatty and dirty piece of blanket) that perhaps she was not yet ready for the rigours of organised groups, perhaps she would benefit from spending more time with Mum for a while.  I nodded sagely, collected my daughter and started for home.  As I was putting her in the car, I enthusiastically asked her if she would like to come here during the day and play with the things in the room and be looked after by the lady she had just met.  She was three and a half years old.  She looked at me with wide blue eyes and said “Not out with Mum”.  I was suddenly horrified at what I was trying to do, and was moved to tears at her obvious preference to be with me, and I felt the need to honour this wish. 

I listened to my child, and I listened to the teacher, readjusted my working life and did not enrol my daughter.  Six months later, after discussion with the principal, I again decided that she was not ready, and instead enrolled her in the playgroup and we went together.  PB stayed in the car during playgroup and she announced after a term that she would like to play in “the other room”.  She began kindergarten this year at the age of four and a half and after the initial adjustment, is very happy with her new activities. 

I began to devour the contents of the library and to bombard my husband with my new understanding.  He listened with fascination (not!) as I extorted the benefits of the Steiner philosophy and began to make plans to alter our entire lives in order to fully embrace it.  To my pourings forth on the evils of lego and the necessity to prevent our daughter from reading, he quietly responded that our daughter liked her lego and loved to “read”.  I am myself a passionate reader, had a very early introduction to reading and consequently am a passionate advocate for the provision of books for young children.  I began to grapple with the question of how to use what I had read, which touched a core in me as nothing else had, without turning my child’s life inside out.  I began to realise that it was not practical for us to attempt to bring up my child in a Steiner vacuum so I thought more deeply about how I could do this. 

I did not remove all things plastic from her room.  I realised in all fairness that she had spend her entire young life playing with plastic and anyone looking in my kitchen can immediately attest to my fetish for plastic containers with lids.  No, I thought, I cannot live without plastic!  Again, I wondered how I was ever going to be able to support what the teacher was doing and  “do” a Steiner upbringing while still maintaining my child’s existing world.  Gradually I began to make subtle changes.  Television was easily solved, as I have long been unconvinced of its benefits for young children and my daughter’s viewing was strictly controlled.  I simply began to suggest alternatives to television and within a few days she was too busy and forgot to ask to watch television.  She now watches only at others’ houses (there is little one can do about this) and on rare occasions if she is unwell.  I retained all her favourite toys, including her vast collection of “friends” (those horribly kitsch soft toys that quietly breed in the toy box) with which she has long played involved games for hours, but quietly filed them in less obvious places in her room. 

I began to knit animals.  My first attempts were somewhat lumpy, did not stand up, and the accompanying grass rolled up like instant lawn.  However my daughter was awestruck and played with her strange looking donkey for hours.  “Mum, you made a hoooorse!” she squealed in amazement.  I realised that she had never seen me make anything that did not come off a stove top or out of an oven.  I practised until they stood up, and they now line the shelf in her room.  My husband made her a beautiful wooden bed from recycled timber and I a basket of homemade beanbags for Christmas.  A basket of off-cut blocks now stands in the corner of her room and her desk discreetly occupies a corner of the greenhouse, where she can still access it but it is no longer prominent. I acquired a rocking horse, and my mother-in-law provided our baby with a hand-made macrame swing and a wooden tricycle.  The collection of “my little ponies” stayed (groan) but I confined my plastic box fetish to the kitchen and transferred all the toys into baskets, giving the room a softer look.   

She has always spent a lot of time “cooking”, with the result that there is never any rice in the kitchen because it is all in bowls of goo in various stages of fermentation in the greenhouse as I am not allowed to throw out any “cakes”.  We still do collage, but I now provide less  bought materials and encourage the use of grains and flowers, etc instead.  I still provide books, we read by the hour and this is not something I would change.  However, having attended Horst Kornberger’s talk on late literacy, I no longer believe that I will need to quietly teach my daughter to read in order to ensure that she does not “miss out” as I now see that what she is already doing is just as important.  There is no hurry.

I recently had to go to the dentist and I seized the opportunity to take my daughter so she could experience having her teeth checked and become accustomed to going to the dentist.  After I had had my filling, it was her turn, and she became frightened and began to refuse to climb on the chair.  Despite reassurance, she was still unwilling so I was about to abandon my efforts for another day when the dentist suggested she have a ride in the chair on Mum’s lap.  She agreed to this (top marks to the dentist!) and I laid on the chair with her on top of me, she put on the special sun glasses, lay back and allowed the dentist to count and check her teeth.  It suddenly struck me that despite all her protestations that she is “big” and my sometimes hurried attempts to encourage her to master things in order to make life easier, that she is just a tiny person, and new experiences are frightening.  As I lay in the dentist chair, I could feel the immense trust flowing from her and I was once again awed at the responsibility of parenting this small form of humanity in my arms and felt anew how important it is that I get this right as I will only get one chance. 

I realised that my daughter will (I hope) spend in excess of 50 years as an adult, but will only be a child for 18, and will only be “little” for a small part of that time.  Since my introduction to Steiner education I have read and attended talks which stressed this, but it was this experience in the dentist chair that fully brought to me the realisation that there is no hurry for my daughter to grow up, that I need to enjoy her smallness. My daughter’s passage to adulthood is not something that I need to do for her but an all consuming process of which I am privileged to be a part.  I see her crouching in the greenhouse, intently gazing at the progress of caterpillar up her arm (“look, Mummy, legs!”), body-painting her one year old sister with a paintbrush dipped in mud, making a forest in the tomatoes for her horses, and I feel strongly that although I do not carry out all Steiner’s philosophies in the bringing up of my child, I have internalised his most important message.  There is no hurry.

by: Colene Gray, Mother of  Friday , K5
This article was written for “Waldorf Weavings”, the seasonal newsletter of the West Coast Steiner school.