Understanding Deeper Developmental Needs

Understanding Deeper Developmental Needs: Holistic Approaches for Challenging Behaviors in Children

How do we best help a child who is struggling?
By learning to look carefully. 

Enlivening our observation skills allows us to see consistent behavioral patterns and dynamics that show up in children’s movement, learning, sensing, and memory. Within those activities we can learn to see archetypal pathways of development. Watching the way a child moves, listens, eats, or sleeps offers us insights into a child’s experience of the world. Those gestures help tell the child’s story. We learn to think in living processes, not checklists.

Constitutional, or fundamental, polarities—as introduced by Rudolf Steiner—allow for individualized, therapeutic approaches to challenges such as aggressive behaviors, attention problems, anxiety, autistic behaviors, and depression.

Teachers, counselors, and medical doctors will find tools here for enriching their work with children. These constitutional pictures are accompanied by diverse therapeutic indications that will encourage children to unfold new growth and maturation, from the inside out.

C O N T E N T S:

Introduction

Part One: The Polarity of Integration: Between Heaven and Earth

1. Building a Spiritual Concept of the Human Being
2. The Polarity of Integration: Between Heaven and Earth
3. Early Childhood as an Inflammation
4. Earthly and Cosmic Polarity
5. Seeing the Incarnation Process through Movement
6. Therapeutic Indications
7. Grimm’s Fairy Tale “Iron John”
8. Seeing Morality as an Expression of the Earthly–Cosmic Polarity
9. Putting the Pieces Together
10. The Process of Integration in Later Life as a Path of Self-development
11. The Six Basic Exercises

Part Two: The Polarity of Differentiation: Between Blood and Nerve

12. Sensing into an Experience of Self through the Foundational Senses
13. The Pathway to the Life Sense
14. Awaking into Thought and Sensory Activity
15. Meeting and Guiding the Differentiation Process
16. Practical Applications of the Large- and Small-headed Polarity
17. First-Grade Readiness: Observations and the Polarity of Differentiation
18. Building an Inner Foundation to Meet the Outer World

Part Three: The Polarity of Connection: Between Point and Periphery

19. From Breathing to Waking and Sensing
20. The Epileptic Constitution
21. Therapy for the Epileptic Constitution
22. The Point-and-Periphery Meditation
23. The Hysteric Constitution
24. Bringing Therapeutic Support to the Hysteric Constitution
25. Aggressive Behaviors toward Other Children
26. Boundary as “Limitation” and Pathway as “Therapeutic Approach”
27. Fairy Tale Images for the Pathway

Part Four: Bringing the Pieces Together

28. Helping Children with Attention or Memory Problems
29. Developmental Challenges, Opportunities, and Gifts for Children Coming into the World Today

Appendices:

1. Constitutional Support through the Biographical Stages of Childhood

2. Medical Treatment Guide for Physicians:
Remedy Pictures for Children with Feeble Movement and Feeble Moral Sensing
Remedy Pictures for Children with Maniacal Movement and Kleptomania
Archetypal Remedy Pictures for Working with the Large-headed Constitution
Archetypal Remedy Pictures for Working with the Small-headed Constitution
Archetypal Remedy Pictures for Working with the Epileptic Constitution
Archetypal Remedy Pictures for Working with the Hysteric Constitution
Archetypal Remedy Pictures for Working with Organ Imbalances

Notes
Bibliography
Index

About the Author

Adam Blanning, MD, a native of Denver, attended the University of Colorado for both his undergraduate English literature and medical degrees. In 2003 he founded the Denver Center for Anthroposophic Therapies. Dr. Blanning also works as an educational and developmental consultant for area Waldorf schools (Denver and Boulder) and has lectured on anthroposophic medicine and child development throughout the U.S. and Canada. He currently serves as president of the Association for Anthroposophic Medicine and Therapies in America (AAMTA), sits on the board of the Physicians’ Association for Anthroposophic Medicine (PAAM), and teaches in its training courses. Dr. Blanning is a founding member and core faculty for the Nurturing the Roots course in Waldorf early childhood therapeutic education and teaches and directs the two-year PAAM curriculum in school doctoring. He likes to grow things in his backyard and spend time with his family when he is not doctoring.