When Our Mothering is Questioned

Mary Cassatt ~ Young Mother Sewing

One of the great challenges of mothering and perhaps fathering too, forgive me dads - as I don't know about the experience of being a dad as my experience is as a mom - is that family members may question, criticize or even attempt to "correct" the choices we carefully and consciously make on how we want to parent our children. 

For families who are drawn to a Waldorf lifestyle, there may be concern that we're not doing enough "academic" work or instructed "teaching" in the early years, that we're not teaching the ABCs and giving scientific explanations of why the sky is blue, that we're not teaching reading and we're not emphasizing the printed word. 

We may be criticized for making the commitment to stay home and care for our child  rather than send him or her to "school" at age three, which unfortunately, outside of Waldorf environments, tends to be an intellectual cram down of what the child is most ready for at a ripe age six or seven, but not at age three. Not to mention the lack of time during "school" for all important physical movement and exploration and child initiated free play, which is the foundation of healthy intellectual development that will come later. 

Even in Waldorf environments, being awoken early, dressed and rushed out the door may not necessarily be in the best interest of the child or family life. Then there's the question of peer orientation, the huge, often unspoken problem we face today when children become socially oriented to peers, who are by their nature immature, rather than remain healthily oriented to their parents and family values. 

It saddens me to see the cultural shift that has taken place in my lifetime, in which moms, home and family life have been devalued in the name of convenience for employers who value employee attendance over the importance of family and a healthy home life as the foundation of a healthy society. It's tough as a new mom, a mom of littles to follow one's heart and inner knowing and trust ourselves in the face of these challenges from outside. It's even harder when close family members question what we do.  

I found myself in a similar place with family members when my children were young. The focus seemed to be all about what I did NOT do instead of what we did do. I didn't read to my children when they were very young. I didn't go into scientific explanations of things. My mom was surprised because we are a family of avid readers. I shared some information with my mom and my husband. (Husband was a lawyer and that just gave him more ammo to argue about it.) What really made a difference for us, and it took me a long time to figure it out was to focus on what we DID do. I shifted the focus to what we did do everyday.

As women, we tend to underestimate ALL that we do during the course of a day, and all the ways we are teaching through our doing, how we nurture literacy through speech and movement games and through the way we speak to our children. I incorporated nursery rhymes from birth with our daily activities like diaper changes and getting dressed. We set a pretty table together and sang a blessing. (We still do.) I told little stories about daily household events. I made simple finger puppets. I made simple felt animals and people figures. I cleared out the space alongside the kitchen where they could play close to me while I worked. We baked bread together, we made soup together, we did laundry together. My children were with me or playing close by in the kitchen for what seemed like all day. We spent lots of time outside, usually with me doing chores and the children playing or joining in the work (letting the chickens out, feeding them, hanging laundry. raking leaves, shoveling.) We painted together. We made gifts together. 

As my children got older and family members saw how family oriented they were, how well they played, how they made beautiful cards and simple gifts and crafts, how they loved being outdoors and in nature, building snowmen, sledding, tobogganing, ice skating, having a sense of reverence, I think it brought to mind fond memories of aspects of their own childhoods.  I quit talking about Waldorf ed to them (it was hard) - that made a huge difference. If I didn't talk about it as "Waldorf," and didn't give it a name, but just emphasized that I wanted my children to experience the wonder of childhood and be able to really play and spend time outside and later play jump rope and knit and whittle, they seemed to be less concerned about it. Now my youngest is in his teens, and all of that questioning has been forgotten as they are indeed kind, literate, hardworking, creative and capable people. So dear mamas, my suggestion is to bring the conversation back to you, to all that you do in a day, all those things that seem most ordinary, that deeply nurturing the healthy development of your child.  

        
                                                   Peace on Earth begins at Home.