Years ago, I wrote a little book about the upbringing of the child, from birth, or perhaps even from conception, up to the seventh year of life, up to the change of teeth. I found in the poet Novalis a sentence that more or less expresses what I wanted to say in that little book, namely: The child is love that has become visible. Beautiful! So I gave that little book this title. That was years ago, and of course the question has often come up: Can you not also write something about the child in the second stage of development, namely from the change of teeth up to puberty? I have now tried to do that, and what I always “do” when I begin writing a text is that I actually first think about: what is now really the core of what I want to say, what I think is important.
Well, when you think of children who go to primary school, you can already see them before you, as it were, with an iPad, a phone, or they sit in front of the TV. That’s how I came to a kind of total impression of the problem of upbringing in our time; and so this time I have given the little book the title “Screen Children,” because it seems to me that this is the greatest challenge of our age.
How do you actually deal with that? And when I began to think and to meditate about it, and of course also looked into my memory — back to the time when I myself had small children — then that technology did not yet exist, but there was the television. What is it really about?
It is clear — at least it is clear to me — that you cannot place children outside their time. Of course, you would most love to keep them completely away from these modern means of communication, but that would mean placing them outside their time and actually also outside the social context, because other children do have those little gadgets. So you must somehow find a way to, first of all, postpone it as long as possible; but at a certain moment, you can no longer do that, and then you will have to accept that you must watch it happen — that such a, yes, I find it a holy child that goes to primary school — that it must inwardly corrupt itself by looking at those horrible images that, for example, in videos and games are “offered” to the children.
What can you do?
And what is clear to me — and that is based on the spiritual perception of the child that I learned from Rudolf Steiner — what is clear is that the child, with the change of teeth, concludes a very important period, namely, that the second body that the child has — the first body being what you see, the physical body — but that this physical body has the form and the life of a second “body,” which you must put in quotation marks, because you do not see it as a body, but you can learn to experience it in its activity. That second body had in that first period, up to the change of teeth, the complete task of giving the physical body its definitive individual form — not only from heredity, but really from the child itself — to give it its individual form and to bring the life processes into action as healthily as possible. And that process is then completed with the change of teeth; you can actually see that in the fact that the teeth fall out. And when you then know that a part of that etheric body, that life body, that formative, working part, which in the first phase had to be completely at the disposal of the physical body — that this, when it becomes free for the individual development of the etheric body, that a part of it then becomes available for the development of thinking — yes, then it becomes clear that this development of thinking in primary school is of the very greatest importance. That you do not take forces there that are actually destined for a much later phase in development. And of course, one sees now in our time — because people no longer know anything about it — the greatest sin against this principle, when, for example, children are called upon to form an opinion about something like politics, for instance, or the situation in the world.
They can do that, but it demands forces that they actually do not yet have at their disposal. And I have gotten the feeling: it is actually like when you play the piano — you have two hands. On top there is usually the melody, and below there is the accompaniment. And it is of course the intention that you align those two staves, that they are played together. And you then get the feeling that that upper stave, which is actually the audible, melodic one, is nowadays brought into enormous acceleration, while the lower stave, the rhythm and accompaniment, simply goes on as it should.
But what do you then have?
First of all, everything is of course false and incomprehensible, but secondly, at the end of the piano piece there is still a whole piece of accompaniment left over, while the melody has long since finished. And that is the feeling I get — that is what is happening with children. They have to develop so quickly — and they can do it too, that is the big problem: they can do it. They have to move ahead so fast that the organism with which they must do it does not keep up. And if it did keep up, then you would be dealing with illness. The fact is that for thinking — the development of thinking, the development of the intellect — those life forces become available, and that they must therefore actually be developed. That is actually the theme of my little book, because what one sees is that what children are being offered at school — but also at home, with their iPads and iPhones and the television — what they are being offered is the counter-image of the etheric.
So that which you can see as life forces — which are so unspeakably delicate and pure, artistic; just look at nature and you will see it — those forces are being materialized. And thus, in fact, spoiled by all those ugly images that are visible on the screen, not to mention the effects that emanate from the technology itself. It is, in truth, one great catastrophe. And what you can do now — because you cannot avoid it, it is as it is — what you can do is try to create a counterbalance to that which you cannot avoid. But that of course demands a lot of effort, and most parents do not have that effort available, because they both work, are overburdened, have the children as a kind of side issue, even though they are also the main issue. They cannot spend so much time and energy creating a balance. And if they do want to give that time and energy, then often they themselves have no desire to do those things that would truly be a counterweight. For that would mean that you would have to deepen yourself in what the etheric actually is. And that would mean that you would have to realize that you must go into nature, that you must seek out the elements — I mean: the beach, the water, the air, the sun, the little stones, the shells, the plants that grow in the dunes or in the forest, the trees, the mushrooms, the nuts, everything.
You should actually seek all that out — and you should not just seek it out, but you should also be filled with the awareness that you are busy letting the child remember that this is actually the world they have come into. That this is earthly existence, and not those images that work so delightfully distractingly on the devices. That is what the little book is largely about. I have tried to give, as simply as possible, impressions of how, as parents, you can seek out the etheric world for the child and make it active in the child’s life. But beyond that, of course, many other things are connected with it, namely sleeping, health and illness, behavior, contact with other children, and so on. All that is also touched upon, but central stands the screen child.
I hope that many people will read this little book, and above all that they will thereby come to the realization that the human being is not only a visible physical being, but that in the child in primary school that very subtle, artistic, beautiful, delicate, active part of the being becomes available for thinking. And then one would truly very much like to offer that thinking something that is adapted to it and that also has the right tempo. And generally speaking, you can say: you can always slow down — then you never do it wrong, because everything goes too fast. So slowing down is always good. But you must still seek balance.
I could talk about this for hours more, but it is a video meant to draw attention to the fact that the little book exists, so I will now end my plea for the etheric here.
