Richard House, Series Editor
There are parents who are defying the directives of their culture.
Such parents are not only helping their children to have a childhood.
Those parents will help to keep alive a human tradition. [Our
culture] is halfway toward forgetting that children need childhood.
Those who insist on remembering shall perform a noble service.
Neil Postman (see note 1)
Neil Postman's resounding championing of childhood (taken from his important book The Disappearance of Childhood) could hardly provide a more fitting epigraph for this new Early Years book series. In this appendix, (Appendix 3 in Helping Children Overcome Fear) I will briefly describe the new series, setting out its rationale, and drawing upon both the material covered in this book, and more general cultural and educational issues that concern today's parents and early years professionals.
This, the first book in the series, by Russell Evans, sets a fitting tone for the whole series - drawing as it does upon perennial wisdom about the nature and developmentally appropriate understanding of the child; emphasising the crucial importance of expression through free play; and explicitly recognising the importance of the emotional and spiritual dimensions of human existence.
Along with the other books in this series, Helping Children Overcome Fear represents a welcome antidote to the prevailing British early-years ethos of over-active prematurely intellectual adult intrusion into the young child's world - with, for example, its over-testing and the Early Learning Goals. Yet the books in the series also offer their readers many practical insights into a whole range of early years-related questions and issues.
Overall, then, Helping Children Overcome Fear has a focus which is holistic, informed and practical - three adjectives which capture the essence of what this new series intends to offer to those involved with young children who live and/or work in early years settings (i.e. from birth to about 6 years), be they familial or professional.
A consideration of fear and grief in early childhood is a particularly apt focus for the first book in the series, for a number of reasons. First, the book highlights the way in which it is crucial that parents and professionals are aware of the developmentally appropriate needs of the child - and to relate with the child accordingly. As David Elkind has pointed out (see note 2), children are not 'mini-adults', and are positively harmed through having to cope with age-inappropriate demands. This was also one of the many crucial developmental insights that educationalist Dr Rudolf Steiner emphasised, and on which his original indications for Steiner Waldorf education were based, and have subsequently been developed into a worldwide holistic educational movement.
Second, as is clear from both psychoanalytic theory and the important work of Daniel Goleman in his book Emotional Intelligence, the emotions play a quite central role in the young child's world. As Dr Judy Dunn has recently put it (see note 3), 'Emotions are at the center of children's relationships, well-being, sense of self, and moral sensitivity and are centrally linked to their increasing understanding of the world in which they grow up. Yet we have only recently begun to pay serious attention to the significance of children's emotions'. Fear and anxiety are certainly 'core' emotions which all children must learn to cope with and healthily manage in a, balanced and socially enabling way; and Jean Evans' work provides us with an exemplary holistic approach to the child's emotional world in what can often be an exceptionally demanding and alien environment - that of professional medical care.
Third, grief and loss are central to human experience; and the way in which young children are helped to integrate these primary human experiences can set up life-long 'templates' which in turn significantly influence both children's and adults' capacity for 'emotionally competent' and relatively non-neurotic relating in later life. Jean Evans' work again provides us with a wealth of insight into how these difficult emotions can be successfully worked with and integrated.
The new Hawthorn Early Years series aims to provide parents and early years educators/carers with an extensive range of authoritative, accessible, practical books. Its principal focus is the promotion of healthy child development in its physical, emotional and spiritual dimensions. Each book arises from parents' own pressing questions and concerns about their children, such as: 'Why is creative play important?'; 'How can I tell when my child is ready to start formal schooling?'; 'How can I help sick children?'; 'How can I learn to be a family story-teller?', and so on. The series is therefore very much driven by the experience of parents themselves, rather than being primarily professionally or 'expert'-driven, as is much of the early years literature.
The distinctive approach represented in these books is strongly, but not exclusively, informed by the flourishing world-wide network of some 1,500 Steiner-Waldorf kindergartens, and the 75 years of accumulated wisdom on child development that this global movement has built up - founded on the original work of the educationalist Dr Rudolf Steiner. The series will freely draw upon the wisdom and insight of other prominent holistic approaches, including Froebel, Montessori and other respected holistic early years specialists. And it will thus embrace the emerging 'company of like-minded friends' (to adapt a phrase coined by early years Waldorf specialist Sally Jenkinson), working together in their distinct yet complementary ways for healthy child development.
A defining feature of each book will be its focus on a specific topic or question for which parents, teachers or other early years workers commonly require sound information and effective practical input. The series will also encompass Special Needs questions and children's needs for healing, as well as parents' and professionals' own needs for personal and spiritual growth and meaning.
Each book will be based on up-to-date research and practice, and will be written by an authority in the field in question. Hawthorn Press is working in close association and consultation with a range of parent educational organisations in the development of the series - for example, Parent Network and Winston's Wish, the Steiner Waldorf Kindergarten movement and the Steiner Schools Fellowship, the Alliance for Childhood, and Human Scale Education. In this way, the issues that the series will cover will emerge from the concerns of parents and educators themselves in today's demanding and complex world.
Each book's broadly indicative title will accurately describe the book's purpose - for example, Helping Children Overcome Fear by Russell Evans; Story-telling with Children by Nancy Mellon; The Genius of Play by Sally Jenkinson; Introduction to Steiner Waldorf Kindergartens by Lynne Oldfield; and Ready to Learn by Martyn Rawson and Michael Rose, among others. Each book will contain 'Resources' and 'Further Reading' sections so that interested readers can follow up their interest in or commitment to the field in question.
The books in the series will make ideal 'study texts' for reading, study and support groups, as well as authoritative sources for holistic perspectives on early years training courses of all kinds.
In recent years there has been a rapidly growing interest in so-called 'new paradigm' thinking in a whole range of fields, including the natural sciences; and the impulse underlying this new series coheres closely with this developing 'trans-modern', post-materialistic worldview. Parents and early years professionals alike are voicing ever-more vocal disquiet about prevailing cultural and educational challenges to childhood. And it is in this context that the Hawthorn Early Years series will disseminate more holistic values to a public which is increasingly seeking a humane and demonstrably effective alternative to what is currently on offer.
The distorting effects of anxiety on healthy development and learning, and the developmental dangers entailed in premature intellectual or ego development, are themes which will recur throughout the series. The crucial role of free play has already been emphasised: as Professor Tina Bruce said to the Anna Freud Centenary Conference in November 1995, 'Play cannot be pinned down and turned into a product of measurable learning. This is because play is a process [which] enables a holistic kind of learning, rather than fragmented learning'.
Relatedly, the young child needs an unintruded-upon space in which to play with, elaborate and work through her deepest wishes, anxieties and unconscious fantasies. In turn, the child will thereby gain competence in healthily managing - with her own freely developed will - her curiosities and anxieties about relational being and human existence. Sally Jenkinson's Hawthorn Early Years book, The Genius of Play, will develop these arguments at much greater length.
Another consistent theme will be the pernicious deforming effects on young children of premature cognitive-intellectual development. As Professor Patrick Bateson and Paul Martin have written,(see note 4) 'Children who are pushed too hard academically, and who consequently advance temporarily beyond their peers, may ultimately pay a price in terms of lost opportunities for development'. Certainly, the intrusively 'adult-centric', over-intellectual agenda of the British government's early years educational environment may conceivably be doing untold damage to a whole generation of cognitively hot-housed children.
We are already witnessing signs of the harm being done by materialistic culture in general and the current early years educational regime in particular. A recent study by the National Health Foundation (see note 5) reports record levels of stress-related mental health problems in children. And in a recent press report,(see note 6) the frightening scale of medically diagnosed child 'behavioural disorders' was highlighted, with 'tens of thousands of schoolchildren with mild behaviour problems [now] being drugged with Ritalin simply in order to control them'.
It is by no means far-fetched to propose some kind of causal relationship between the burgeoning and comparatively recent epidemic in child 'behavioural disturbances', and recent early years policy 'innovations' which demand a relentless and intrusive 'control-freak' surveillance, measurement, assessment and testing of children's developmental process - not to mention the forced imposition of premature, adult-centric cognitive-intellectual learning at ever-earlier ages.
Symptoms of so-called 'attention deficit disorder' are surely far better understood as children's understandable response to, and unwitting commentary on, technological culture's ever-escalating overstimulation - and not least, its cognitively-biased distortions of early child development. And until our policy-makers develop the insight to recognise and then respond to this malaise at a cultural level rather than at an individualised medical level, the prevalence of children's 'behavioural difficulties' will inevitably continue to escalate - Ritalin or no Ritalin.
These, then, are just some of the themes that will recur in this important new series. As I write (May 2000), there is a growing sense that the tide is beginning to turn against those pernicious cultural forces that have been systematically dismembering childhood - and towards a re-membering of a holistic, humanistic vision of childhood which sees the damage that is being wrought by modern culture, and which offers practical and effective alternatives. To the extent that the Hawthorn Early Years series can buttress and reinforce this mounting sea-change in attitudes to childhood, it will serve its purpose.
1. From his important book The Disappearance of Childhood.
2. From his book Ties that Stress: The New Family Imbalance,
(Harvard University Press, 1994)
3. Quoted in S. A. Denham's Emotional Development in Young
Children, (Guildford Press, 1998)
4. In their Design for Life: How Behaviour Develops, (Cape,
1999)
5. J. Tweed, 'Mental health problems rise in all children', (see
below).
6. A.Browne, 'Mind-control drug threat for children', (see below)
Browne, A. (2000) 'Mind-control drug threat for children', The Observer newspaper, 27 February, pp.1, 2
Bruer, J. T. (1999) The Myth of the First Three Years, Free Press, New York.
Coles, J. (2000) 'Hyper-parenting: are we pushing our children too hard?', The Times newspaper, 'Times 2' Supplement, 3-4
Elkind, D. (1981) The Hurried Child: Growing Up Too Fast Too Soon, Addison-Wesley, Reading, Mass.
Elkind, D. (1987) Mis-education: Pre-schoolers at Risk, A. A. Knopf, New York
Healy, J. M. (1990) Endangered Minds: Why Children Don't Think and What We Can Do about It, Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, New York
Healy, J. M. (1998) Failure to Connect: How Computers Affect Our Children's Minds - for Better and Worse, Simon & Schuster, New York
House, R. (1999) 'But what about childhood? Increasing State control erodes autonomy in British early years learning'. Steiner Education, 34 (1), 5-8
Large, M. (1992) Who's Bringing Them Up: How to Kick the TV Habit, 2nd edition, Hawthorn Press, Stroud
Medved, M. & Medved, D. (1998) Saving Childhood: Protecting Our Children from the National Assault on Innocence, HarperCollins, Zondervan
Moore, R. S. & Moore, D. N. (1975) Better Late than Early: A New Approach to Your Child's Education, Reader's Digest Press (Dutton), New York
Postman, N. (1994) The Disappearance of Childhood, Vintage Books, New York
Salzberger-Wittenberg, I, Henry, G. & Osborne, E. (1983) The Emotional Experience of Learning and Teaching, Routledge, London
Sanders, B. (1995) A is for Ox: The Collapse of Literacy and the Rise of Violence in an Electronic Age, Vintage Books, New York
Steiner, R. (1995) The Kingdom of Childhood, Anthroposophic Press, Hudson, New York
Steiner Education (2000) Special Issue: 'Caring for Childhood: Waldorf and the Early Years Debate',Vol.34, No 2
Thomson, J. B. & others (1994) Natural Childhood: A Practical Guide to the First Seven Years, Gaia Books, London
Tweed, J. (2000) 'Mental health problems rise in all children', Nursery World, 6 April, 8-9