Create a Waldorf Family Life
- Get rid of the televisions, video games, and limit computer access until age twelve.
- Go outside and play every day, year round.
- Eat your food whole.
- Hug every day.
- Be open to what the little ones will teach you.
- Be the firm and loving authority.
- Make it yourself, and if you don't know how, learn
- Tell stories and play games. A lot.
- Think about how your things speak to you.
- Keep the voices calm, quiet, and as natural as possible.
- “Do not worry that your children never listen to you, worry that they are always watching you.” ~ Robert Fulgum
- Meditate or do some form of inner work daily.
- Rid yourself of anything that has not been touched in over a month.
- Sing and share lovely verses for important days and every day.
- Create rituals around bedtime, light a candle, sing lullabies and pray to the guardian angels.
- Hold back intellectual concepts from under 7 as they are in the motor centre still.
- Try and keep a dreamlike quality in everything you do.
- Slow down and take time.
- Establish rhythm, use repetition, foster reverence, awe and wonder.
- Create a beautiful and harmonious environment.
- Honor the need for time and space.
- Sing through the day.
- Have conversations with the spiritual world.
- Remember the elemental beings.
- Be authentic in what you do and say .
- Involve the children in household tasks in all areas of domestic work from a very young age
- Active learning - learning by doing, by observing, by making, by experiencing.
- Make things from scratch, let the kids be involved and observe the TIME and love necessary to create something beautiful and lasting, soup, bread, cream, butter...
- Create gardens, meals, tree forts, gifts, art....
- Working on ones self (meaning the parent)
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This list came out of a thread on Marsha Johnson's yahoo discussion group waldorfhomeeducators in which members stated how to be a Waldorf family. I think it's a nice reminder and validation that many others are striving along with us to create a healthy home life for our children and each other.
