A good friend I hadn’t heard from in a while texted me the other day. “What’s new?”
“Oh not much,” I said. “I’ve joined the board of a local Waldorf preschool, for some reason.”
My kids won’t even be eligible for this preschool for 2 ½ years, but I am a planner. Also, I feel desperate to meet some normal people here in Utah. And by “normal,” I mean weirdo hippies who aren’t afraid to let their freak flag fly.
I went to an alternative preschool when I was little. It was really just a loose band of families determined to educate their kids in a different way, and that way happened to be sort-of modeled on Waldorf ideas. By the time I was six it had disbanded, and I ended up in public school. But my vague early memories of Hilltown are all positive, unlike the majority of my memories of public grammar school, where I often felt isolated and lonely.
Waldorf education is all about self-expression, creativity, and nature. It’s zero about common-core testing and homework. It’s about play. Imagine that. Letting kids be kids.
It’s also about not letting your kids watch screens. When you send you kids to Waldorf school, you actually have to promise that they don’t watch TV or use computers.
In a way this is not a big problem in our house, because, while we technically own a giant flat-screen TV, we don’t use it. We don’t have cable, and we don’t often hang out in the room where the TV is installed. It’s a remnant from my husband’s first marriage, actually, which was a whole different animal. Once in a great while, we’ll go downstairs and start a fire and watch a DVD after the girls are asleep, but they’ve only actually hung out in that room once so far. When I do watch TV, it’s on my tiny iPad in bed, after they’ve fallen asleep in their own room.
However, I can’t claim to be pious about the screen thing, because I’m atrocious with my iPhone, and something must be done. As the girls get older, I’m starting to notice that they notice me noticing my iPhone, like, a lot. At first, they were obsessed with my iPhone and always sneakily trying to grab it and put it in their mouths, like you do with all good things. I felt bad about this, because I knew they were gravitating toward the thing that holds mom’s attention so often.
Now, though, they’ve moved on to bringing me my iPhone if they notice it lying around. I feel much worse about this, because I imagine them thinking “Oh no! Mom doesn’t have her vital other appendage!”
What am I teaching them?
I have to get it together before my kids get much older. I can’t have them showing up at a sweet Waldorf preschool talking about mom and her iPhone addiction.
