By Sue Palmer

Sue Palmer presents wide-ranging research on the toxic cocktail of factors affecting children’s lives today. She provides advice on “detoxifying” childhood, including:
- the importance of real food and real play for children’s development
- why sleep is essential to learning, and how to ensure children get enough of it
- childcare and education, and what works for different age groups
- protecting children from aggressive marketing and the excesses of celebrity culture
- the dangers (and benefits) of growing up in a multimedia “electronic village”.

By Marieke Anschutz

From her experience in working with children of all ages, the author provides a guide to children’s different temperaments and their role in child character, health and personality development. She illustrates her ideas with examples from home and school, using the context of the Waldorf/Steiner School classroom, and discusses how to use these insights in managing and relating to groups and individuals. Drawing on an ancient tradition, Rudolf Steiner referred to four fundamental ‘types’ or ‘temperaments’ in the human personality, each of which has different personal needs and ways of relating socially.

By Alice Miller

Alice Miller explains her conviction that violence and cruelty in society have their roots in conventional child rearing and education. She shows how many children, adapted from birth to the needs and ambitions of their parents, lose the ability to experience and express their true feelings, eventually to become estranged from their real selves. In sublimating their full potential in order to fulfil the desires of their parents, they impede their own creativity, vitality and integrity.

by John Gatto

Although this book is talking about the American education system it could just as easily be applied to other countries. There are some interesting facts and certainly food for thought!

By Freya Jaffke

Rhythm and repetition, together with example and imitation, are pillars on which early learning is based. Freya Jaffke applies these simple principles in ways that are refreshingly sensible and practical. She describes children’s play in kindergarten and provides well-tried advice on this important stage of development at which young children love to imitate the work of adults.

By Nancy Mellon

Telling stories creates special times with children, whether it is bed time, round the fire or on rainy days. Encouraging you to spin golden tales, Nancy Mellon shows how you can become a confident storyteller and enrich your family with the power of story. These methods, exercises and tips will enable you to: create a listening space; use the day’s events and rhythms to make stories; transform old stories and make up new ones; bring your personal and family stories to life; learn stories by heart using pictures, inner theatre, walk about; build your own rich story cupboard.

A doll is an image of a human being and is therefore the toy most suited to develop and enliven the self-image in the growing child.

By Susan Harris

A child immersed in free play is a wonderful sight to behold. There is constant creation, constant transformation. Nothing is impossible.

By Shelia Neilsen

What is a toy? What is its function? What effect does the toy have on the child? What is a child actually doing when he is ‘playing’?

By Ursula Bartning

A creative approach to play therapy for the intellectually disabled child. Much is demanded in the name of social adjustment from the young child, and in a technical, market oriented society this comes to mean adopting and conforming to a mode of living in which opportunities to play creatively and exploratively are replaced by the seduction of sophisticated toys and compelling modes of entertainment which usurp a child’s urge and time to play itself naturally into the world. These stories from play therapy contain many reminders of the often overlooked, even unrecognised, needs and sensitivities of all children. In its warm, caring way the book carries a timely, necessary message from “special needs” children to society.