Early Childhood: How we Rise is How we Raise by Ona Wetherall O’Hara
Early Childhood
How we Rise is How we Raise
Ona Wetherall O’Hara
Early last autumn, I made a fire and baked dragon bread in the outdoor cobb oven we have at our Rosebud pre-kindergarten program. Two children came with me each time I went to the oven to feed the fire and check on the rolls, and most of the class also watched at one point or another from the porch. The next week that activity came to life in the children’s play and each day engaged more and more of the class as first one, then two, then five children and more started feeding little sticks to a hole in a log, going to the sandbox to make a confection, dumping it into the hole, taking it out and offering it to children and teachers, and beginning again.
Young children learn and develop so many skills through imitation and in turn their social, emotional, and cognitive development is supported. Remembering and utilizing this understanding may be our most powerful tool as parents and teachers. How we work, worry, and wonder become the roads on which our children journey to becoming independent humans. The forms we create are the vessels in which their freedom lives. This weighty task holds much that inspires us to be the very best version of ourselves as models worthy of imitation for those who are most dear to us: Our children.
But we often need support. Human support and parenting support. The world of parenting is feeling almost endangered. We are so full of doubt and guilt and are so anxious and fearful. We are overloaded and our nervous systems are fried. We are losing the ability to tap into our intuition and to trust ourselves and others. And, we model this for our children. We intellectualize with our children, constantly asking them to make choices while forgetting that they operate on the intuitive wings of nature which, at the end of the day, nurtures their needs beautifully and often ours as well. This is where we can look to threefold principles and seasonal festivals to support, inspire, and inform us.
Courage, Compassion, Wisdom
After a summer of long sun-bursting days, autumn brings a threading of the needle from the fall equinox to the winter solstice, the shortest day of the year. This progression is accompanied in Waldorf schools by hearty, lusty festivals filled with reflections of courage (Michaelmas and the taming of the dragon), compassion (Martinmas and the offering of warmth), and wisdom (the spiral of light for reflection and connection). These vital human elements are also reflected in the trinities of: Hands, heart, and mind; goodness, beauty, and truth; and willing, feeling, and thinking.
We are all on a path of human becoming, always searching for purpose, trust, and meaning. We seek this for ourselves, for our children, and for our community. We long to know ourselves and, in this, we need each other and empathy for the journey. Universally human and divinely individual elements spiral together through the eye of the needle in striving, wonder, and intention. Reminding ourselves to tap into and reflect outward courage, compassion, and wisdom will support us so that when we look back on our parenting years – what may be our most influential season of life – we can take pride in the way we showed up. Seasonal rhythms invite and implore us to embrace and celebrate our spiritual nature, connecting us not only to the cosmos but to ourselves, each other, and the world around us. Nature also helps connect us to how our children naturally engage – first through experience, then emotion, then thinking – which is the opposite of the way we adults tend to approach life.
We strive to model and cultivate respect, appreciation, admiration, and wonder in meaningful and beautiful ways. It is often challenging to find the energy for this striving when we feel the fatigue of life and thinking trying to overpower us. Help can be found by looking at some of the threefold foundations of Waldorf educational pedagogy. This threefold working in harmony is the wonder, the promise, and the hope of humanity. For ourselves and our children, while sweating the small stuff and the big, we can pause and find our courage, our compassion, and our wisdom. We are rising up because we are raising up the future of our world.
Ona Wetherall O’Hara is a Lead Pre-K teacher, Early Childhood Leader, Governing Team Member, and Parent at Kimberton Waldorf School. She has been a teacher for sixteen years, having received Waldorf Early Childhood Teacher and LifeWays training, and the full Anthroposophic Psychology training. She believes that through relationship-based education that includes a holistic picture of human development, she can support children and parents in their journeys to becoming self directed, conscious, and compassionate human beings.