Before our eldest was of school age we moved near a well established Steiner (Waldorf) School which they both attended until they were about nine or ten years old. One of the biggest benefits that we as a family got from being part of that school community was that screens were absent at school and very much minimised in the homes of most families. Our children spent their early years running around, being creative, interacting with people and nature and almost never watching a screen.
We only started watching movies when Luke was six and Lara was four, but even then only one movie a week, carefully selected.
However, once Luke was nine, the restrictions started to diminish. It’s not been the easiest journey, and there has been mourning at seeing how screens affect them in various ways.
But at some point we faltered in our conviction that continuing to seclude our kids in this way was serving them. Around the age of nine we saw a shift in them towards wanting to know about what is actually happening in the world, and to start engaging with it, learning about it, and eventually mastering it.
We didn’t want to stand against that kind of biological necessity in them, but I have no regrets about holding back the tide of digital information for so long. It let them dwell for years in the “mythic realm”, the place of imagination and wonder. It allowed us to have a lot of choice over the impressions they received, and the stories they heard.
And most of the stories they heard were from me. Over a four year period, until Luke was nine and Lara was seven, I told them a new intuitive bedtime story pretty much every night. It was a most beautiful experience to share with my children my own life’s learnings and the wisdom of my intuition in the language they most understood: the language of fairy tales.
I recorded every one, and those stories form the bulk of the stories on Palace of Stories.. Most were re-recorded in my recording studio, although in some cases the original recordings were so cute (with the children making funny comments in the background, or the atmosphere being so intimate and unrepeatable) that I included them as they were.
Now it’s been many years since that bedtime ritual ended. It now feels like a very, very long time ago, a precious time in which their tender inner world and my tender inner world could meet, in that magical place where day becomes night and the best stories are born.
If you are a parent, or you work with young children, and you’d like to explore the magic of telling intuitive stories, then check out my course Telling Intuitive Stories to Children. It will lead you step by step into telling stories for children that spring from your own inner experience, to speak to theirs.
Those early childhood years are a precious time in which the foundations of a child’s view of the world are shaped. This course can help make them as nurturing as possible.
