Book by Rahima Baldwin Dancy   (Celestial Arts, 384 pages)  
The place to start if you have young children. Waldorf indications from birth through age six, including growth and development, parenting issues, creative play, and activities to do with your child.  Meryn G. Callander writes:  The importance of what our children learn in the home and through their relationship with us forms the irreplaceable foundation of all that comes later. Mother, childbirth educator, midwife, and Waldorf educator, Baldwin aims to deepen our understanding of the nature of the young child as a whole being--body, mind, emotions, and spirit--so enabling us to meet their needs for balanced development.  It is Baldwin's sensitive, sincere, and ever-so-natural tending to the soul and spirit, as well as mind and body, of the newborn and young child, that makes this a very special book.  In a society which values intellectual development above all else, we tend to ignore other aspects of development. We reason with our children as if they were grown ups and teach them with techniques appropriate for much older children. Distrustful of natural processes, we believe we have to do something in order to ensure our child's development. Milestones of the first three years--walking, talking, thinking, and memory--occur by themselves, according to their own timetable. Trusting natural processes does not mean that we do nothing, but that the things we do need to be consonant with the child's own developmental stages....This book includes and goes beyond the physicalities of parenting to offer substance for heart and soul to ponder. -- Reviewed by Meryn G. Callander, see http://wellness.thewellspring.com/TWO