How to Create a Waldorf home

Creating a Waldorf Home

Whether their children are grades students at a Waldorf school, homeschoolers studying with a parent-teacher or preschoolers organically learning and growing at home, many families appreciate a warm, organic environment and they want to create a Waldorf home.

The home is the perfect place for Waldorf principles to be made manifest. However your child is interacting with Waldorf Education, it is a wise and beautiful thing to sync your homelife with Waldorf ideals.

There are so many blogs and websites that give beautiful pictures of what a Waldorf home can look like, but creating a Waldorf home is about much more than beautifully painted walls and colorful play silks.

Creating a Waldorf home comes down to three main ideas – rhythm, connection and imagination. Let’s take a closer look at these ideas and see how we can bring them about at home.

Rhythm

There are many ways you can think about rhythm, but however you decide to look at it, the value of rhythm is in providing stability and predictability for your family. What are the benefits of rhythm for your family?

• More predictability = fewer arguments
• Smooth transitions from one activity to another
• Ensuring regular chores, self-care and other tasks get accomplished

Once you start with a regular rhythm at home, you’ll find that it supports you just as much as it does your children.

Rhythm in Practice

For example, when my children were younger, we had a regular routine of child bath time while I cooked dinner. Everyday around 4:30 I would go to the bathroom and start running the water, the sound of the running water naturally inspired the next activity – the little ones came to the bathroom and got ready for their bath, while I went to the kitchen across the hall and started cooking. It was such a natural part of our routine, once the water was running, taking the next step just seemed to happen on its own. As a result, the children got bathed and the family got fed – without either activity feeling like a cumbersome chore.

Connection

The next important aspect of creating a Waldorf home is connection. Of course, there are so many different kinds of connections that happen for children and parents, but the connections that I think are most important in creating a Waldorf home are connection with nature and connection with other human beings – the family.

Connection with Nature

First, ensuring that you build outdoor time into your regular rhythm is an important way to bring Waldorf ideals to life in your home. Whether you have an infant who needs to breathe fresh air from a stroller or baby sling, a toddler who enjoys splashing in puddles, or a teenager who can help with chores in the garden, make sure you and your children get outside everyday. The sensory experiences available outdoors cannot be recreated inside and they play an important part in a child’s development. An experience of the outdoors gives children such a clear feeling understanding for the natural world – better than any book can.

Connection with the Human Being

Secondly, take every opportunity to connect with each other. In Waldorf schools information is imparted directly from teacher to student, without the intermediary of a textbook. In the home, the connection between parent and child is such a natural part of every interaction, it isn’t difficult to support the importance of that human to human connection. There are a couple of ways you can look to enhance the connection, though.

• Tell stories to your children. There is plenty of wonderful connection that can happen through a story book, but when you tell your child a story from your imagination or an anecdote from your childhood, you’ll feel the difference.
• Work together. Invite children into the kitchen to help you cook. Require children to set the table together. My two teens are in charge of doing the dishes together after dinner every night. The amount of laughing, storytelling and connecting that happens in that kitchen each night is a wonder. I know that when my children grow up that little ritual will be something they’ll remember and bring to their own families.

Imagination

One of the greatest gifts of Waldorf Education is its emphasis on imaginative play. The more ways you can enhance your child’s ability to use their imagination and go through the process of creating inner pictures, the more creative, artistic and fulfilled they will become. In Waldorf schools teachers tell stories without visual aids to help children exercise their capacity for inner picturing, there are plenty of ways you can support this at home, too.

Toys, Images and Stories

• Imaginative play – Give your young children unformed toys and “play materials.” The less formed a toy is, the greater its potential and the more work your child has to do to create the toy herself. Wooden blocks, pieces of fabric, sticks and other items found in nature are the perfect playthings for young children.

• Images and metaphor in daily life – Go through your day-to-day life looking for little metaphors and imaginations for your child to connect with. If you need your little boy to stand up straight, invoke the image of a soldier or a king. Help your child to understand different types of plants by giving them personalities. Not only will these images give your child something to grasp onto and understand better, but it also builds flexibility of thinking.
• Storytelling – If you couldn’t tell, I’m a huge fan of telling stories to children. The images and little narratives available to children in the form of a story are valuable on so many levels and there is no better way to cultivate your child’s imagination than to tell stories. Later acting these stories out or reproducing them in artistic form is another fantastic way of building your child’s capacity for inner picturing (and then giving those inner pictures outer form.)

In addition to these, there are plenty of other values that Waldorf parents impart to their children through their conscious creation of a thoughtful home-life. My strongest words of advice are to approach the creation of your home-life with consciousness and intention. Know that the crafting of your day-to-day life is what leaves your child with an understanding of the values that your family holds dear. Make sure those values are evident in your daily life and you’ll feel good about the conscious, intentional parent you are.