To communicate or not? That is the question

Hello,

Life is so much more interesting and dramatic than movies.

Waldorf class responds to challenging life moments affecting our community with support and love, warm meals, help with the children, and of course human comfort. One of the Moms from my unpleasant parent meeting last week that I still need to communicate with was there for me when my life was turned inside out with betrayal and divorce, likewise when her family experienced a life threatening situation.

My difficult discussion from the parent meeting on my mind as another Mom from the school said there is difficulty for that family again. Not just spilled coffee and the contractor put a hole through the wall, but life altering life where people do not come out the same. The other Mother did not share any details with me. None the less, my heart goes to this beautiful family.

The question is do I still talk to her about her misconception regarding her daughter’s use of email?

Should I even discuss this issue? When crisis strikes do you really want to think or are you just in survival mode? Previous conversations this Mother said her daughter does not tell her anything and she would appreciate if I would share news.

Besides the timing issue there is how telling her Mother will affect her petite daughter. Lately I have seen this little girl with a bit of mean streak to real or perceived exclusion by the other girls, open up and develop relationships with the other girls in her class. The email appears to be an effective communication tool that has eased social fears and created a network of friends to share this time in her life. I see this little girl smile, period, I rarely saw a smile before. I wonder if I tell her Mother that she is using email will change all this.

In a previous blog, I describe the parent meeting where the Mother very haughtily announced that her daughter does not use email. At the end of the meeting I notice on my blackberry an email from her daughter. In the Waldorf world the overwhelming technology indoctrination is examined. The effects on a child’s body, mind, and soul are discussed and each class decides when to introduce technology. Computer and TV screens do damage eyes. Creativity is stunted by adopting someone else’s vision of Cinderella as an example. Social interactions are stunted by not doing but being around the computer.

Now I know all the benefits, I hear them all from my child’s Grandparents. Which brings me to why I want to discuss this email issue with someone that I felt was very judgmental towards me at the meeting. In life if you don’t address issues they grow and grow. I would rather open conversation and clear the air. Because at that meeting I felt like I was being burnt at the stake because my daughter has an iPod that she received as a gift from my Dad. And there is computer and TV use as I am divorce, my daughter has two homes.

How does a community infuse their beliefs without damaging a person’s freedom and fostering acceptance of differences, even with the same intent?

“Our moral ideals are our own free creations. We have to fulfill only what we ourselves lay down as our standard of conduct. Thus the insight that truth is the outcome of a free deed also establishes a philosophy of morality, the foundation of which is the completely free personality.”

I am open that is may have been a misconception. I am open that I am on the chopping block. Whatever the case I prefer communication. But do you do it if a family is going through hell?

*Note all quotes are from the founder of Waldorf Education, Rudolf Steiner, in his book Truth and Knowledge

“Thus man’s highest activity, his spiritual creativeness, is an organic part of the universal world-process. The world-process should not be considered a complete, enclosed totality without this activity…This insight has the most significant consequences for the laws that underlie our deeds, that is, our moral ideals; these, too, are to be considered not as copies of some thing existing outside us, but as being present solely within us. This also means rejecting the “categorical imperative,” an external power whose commandments we have to accept as moral laws, comparable to a voice from the Beyond that tells us what to do or leave undone.”