This post was written in 2012 but continues to be valid as our society experiences an ongoing series of traumatic events.
I’ve been silently reading so many posts and responses over the weekend but was so deeply touched and shocked I was unable to speak until today. My heart and prayers go out to all the victims of the attack on Friday and the community and families left to deal with the aftermath. I felt I had nothing to contribute other than my prayers but reading all the posts over the weekend I’ve realized that my own experience dealing with trauma may be of help to some people in our community.
When we lived overseas for six years our small community was rocked by a series of massacres in our neighborhood. The attacks took place over a 25 hour period and were directed at entire families, including children. Our own compound was put on lock-down for many days and many of our friends left the country.
As parents we were left with the chaos of TV news, adult conversations around our children, children sharing bits of information they “overheard” and had exaggerated and much more. What I did was based on what I had learned from Waldorf education. The results for our family and others around us were healing and positive. I would like to share some of these tips with parents and teachers I know in this beautiful online community:
1. Children Take Cues from Parents and Teachers: Steiner, the father of Waldorf education, taught us that a lot of learning happens through modeling (early childhood) and imitation (grade school). When helping children deal with trauma around them what you SAY is not as important as how YOU react. If you remain calm, peaceful and confident, your children will assume the same demeanor.
2. Your Home is a Safe Place: Waldorf education spends a lot of time educating teachers on how to create a safe and harmonious environment for your children and/or students. Much care is taken to place suitable and natural toys in the environment and even to paint the walls with the most suitable colors according to the child’s age. This is not done to pretend that the outside world does not exist, but to provide a model for the child for what we want to acheive on an inner and outer level as human beings. Without a model of harmony children may be lost when they try to find balance in the face of outside chaos. Thus, be sure you continue to keep this environment sacred. Do not allow parents in your parent-child programs to talk about trauma and negative news events in the classroom, do not talk about the events around children or in the home with children, do not watch TV news when children are awake, and do not allow negative speech in the classroom. If you must tackle the topic as a group, do it outside your classroom at a designated time and place. Keep your classroom and home sacred.
3. Explain Only What The Child Needs to Know: Waldorf education teaches us as parents and teachers that children have different capacties to process information at different ages. If your child is sheltered enough not to know about the events there is no reason to let them know. However, if your child is a bit older or is exposed to television and/or multiple children they should be told some bare basics so when they hear it from other people they have somewhere to “file” the information. However, the bare basics can be very simple. Start simple. It does not need to be complex for children and you can always add to it later. But you cannot take away something once you have said it. And what YOU say matters more than what others say. If your child is under the age of 9. Most children of this age and younger take to heart what their parent says and filter most of the rest at another level.
4. Balance with Light: Waldorf education teaches us that a balance of the temperaments is important to our health and well-being. Balance any darkness that seeps in with light. Add in some extra outdoor and physical activities. Increase all experiences with a sanguine nature.
5. Be Available and Encourage Communication: Offer opportunities to communicate about anything. Communication about any topic is what leads to communication about more important topics with children. You don’t need to leave a time to talk about the events that happened. As long as you leave plenty of free “chat” time available children will be able to reach out to you when they need to. With my oldest son board games were the door to communication, with my youngest it was walks in the woods and with my oldest it was snack time.
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