Hello and welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim Jon Paine. So glad you could join us again and join with people all around the world who listen to these podcasts every week. This week, I was watching a very little infant child being played with by a mum and a dad and an older sibling, maybe about a four or five year old sibling.
And I was so moved by the way they were playing with this little one. It was so beautiful and absolutely accurate. Instinctively, they were doing something that parents have been doing with children for probably many thousands of years.
They knew something. And I don't know if they know that they knew, but they did. What they were doing with this little baby was that they were playing Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, right? Almost all of us know that Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star where they were twinkling their fingers and the baby was watching and the little boy, the older sibling, was doing it too.
And it was very beautiful to see them all singing this little song, all twinkling their fingers and having the baby just watch and be able to take part. And they finished that game and then they played This Little Piggy Went to Market. And they played it so gently because the baby was really still quite tiny.
But the little boy was the one who got to touch the baby's tiny little fingernails and little fingers. And we all know that game. Probably all of us know This Little Piggy Went to Market and This Little Piggy and so on.
It goes on and on. And they played it so gently with the baby and the baby was completely held by the activity. Now, I was just struck by this on a number of different fronts.
One of the most beautiful was that they were flowing in to the understanding that children don't just grow up. We have that saying, and I get it because we get taller, we grow up. But children also grow in and they grow down.
And we can best see that in games. And I'll illustrate that more in a moment. But when children are growing, when they're very little, there's almost like this world around them that they're looking far out into.
When they're really tiny in those first couple of months, we see their gaze gazing off into the distance. And then it'll come to us when we come into their field of vision. But it's almost like, like Wordsworth put it, they come trailing clouds of glory.
And they're still looking at that trail that they've come on and journeyed to come to us. And they're growing in, in, in to their limbs. And we know it because the first thing we play with them is little games like Twinkle Twinkle, where the game actually isn't touching them at all.
It's outside them, close to them. We show them our fingers and all those other little games we play. But it's slightly hovering outside them.
And then comes the time when we just have this, this instinctual understanding that we can play with their little fingers and toes. You know, it's like the space is coming from the outside in. Their consciousness is coming in a little bit more.
And we can play with their fingers, with their toes. We can play all those myriad games that every culture has around childhood. And with the hands, you know, round and round the garden like a teddy bear.
That's a particularly British one. I think it's spread, you know, to many other cultures where your finger is just tracing round and round on the palm of a baby's palm. You're just going round and round with your finger.
And then there's a one step and a two step and little steps as you walk your finger up the child's arm from the outside coming in. So many of these games have outside coming in. From fingers to palms to arms, we walk our fingers up.
There's a beautiful ancient wisdom in all this. So children are growing from the periphery and their spatial consciousness is coming into themselves. They're becoming aware of their limbs, aware particularly of their fingers.
And our play echoes that. And the very best games to play with very little children in those first months, you know, three, four, five, six months, a year and just slightly beyond, the very best games we can play are games with fingers, with toes. Some of them are with noses and ears.
But it's all those peripheral points of the body that a child is waking up to. Now, it doesn't mean that the games, finger games and hand games, end when a child's won because they absolutely don't. But they become more sophisticated.
The child becomes more coordinated. Fine motor skills develop. And you can see that their development is coming closer to them.
Likewise, when they're just beginning to toddle, it's when they first get up on their feet and break free from the sofa and they balance and they take those first steps. It's like that saying, you know, they have like mitten strings from God. It's like they're holding on to strings that are hanging down from the air.
But if you think about it, you know, when a child is learning to walk, they first walk with their hands held up and their fingers moving. But as they become one and a half, two, three, their hands move down. And now we can see a child is starting to not only grow in, but a child is starting to grow down.
You watch them when they walk. You know, compare a baby first or a toddler first starting to toddle with a child at two or three. The hands have come down.
They're by their sides. And you can almost see this kind of pictorial evidence, so to speak, of a child growing down. And that down, down, down will continue on through the years.
And you'll see it, you know, as they come more and more into their bodies. They start to be able to run. They start to be able to move and, you know, change direction.
And finally, you get to the end of the down journey at, you know, 14, 15, when gravity is complete, you know. And you think about a 15-year-old and that just gravity and them just, you know, being just so in and beautifully within their own bodies. And sometimes it's almost like gravity has gotten so a hold of them that it's difficult for them to move off their beds, you know.
It's like their bones have decalcified or something. But, you know, it's just heavy. But contrast that with a one, one-and-a-half-year-old, two-year-old who's toddling, you know.
When they're light, everything's light. They're up on their toes. And then a 15-year-old, down, down, down, down, right to the end of that downward journey.
And the games that we play are perhaps the most revealing of this. Because if you watch the games that are played as a little one develops, particularly in those first sort of six or seven years, the best games are the ones that hit the nail right on the head in terms of developmental but spatial development. Because there are some games where a child will just naturally join in and they'll join in beautifully with the song that is being sung or the game that's being played.
If you think about a child jumping rope, for example, skipping. I watched a child once who was joining in with their big sister. And the older children were eight or nine years old and they were jumping rope with the traditional one person at one end, one person at the other, turning the rope.
And they were doing all kinds of quite complex jump rhymes, bending down, touching the ground, turning around, doing all different kinds of steps and rhythms. And this little one wanted to join in. So he came and he stood and he was four years old and the older children were very dear with him.
They turned the rope and it just hit him on the, just gently, didn't hurt, but it hit him on the ankle, it bumped into him. And then he did a little hop. And then they turned it back the other way and it hit him on the, just bumped him again on the other side.
And then he did a little hop. And they were kind of smiling and they were trying very hard, bless them, not to laugh at him or anything. But you see, a little one that age, three, four-year-old, they're a part of the world.
They're still spatially growing in, growing down. So how could he jump himself? He was the rope. The rope was him.
And to complete this picture, after it bumped him three or four times, he actually sat down and he picked up the rope and he started to feel it and touch it and smell it and just explore the rope. Meanwhile, these other children were very patient with him and just let him do that. And then off he went to play his own game because the rope was him.
How can you jump yourself? But later on, when he's eight or nine, he'll be able to do that beautifully when he's grown in, he's grown down, and sure, he's grown up. Okay. So that's it for this week.
If you want to find games that really match a child's development, particularly in these first and early years, do remember this Waldorf Games book for the early years that just came out, actually, a month or so ago, subtitled Games to Play and Sing with Children, Age Three to Seven. It's got some games, actually, in there for younger ones, too. That's a games book that I co-authored with my dear friends, Corey Valetsko and Valerie Badgarret, and you'll see that around about.
And, as always, don't forget, if you'd like to meet with me one-to-one, phone, Skype, and so on, it's one of the things I love to do, is to consult with parents about individual situations for children and offer all the support I can. Okay, that's it for this week. Bye-bye for now.
