Beyond the Rainbow Bridge is based on an American Steiner School Parent Enrichment program. It is a readable handbook which covers topics such as: healthy rhythms in home and school; what kind of play stimulates imagination; how to protect the child’s developing senses; the stages of a child’s physical growth; creative discipline; and how to create birthday stories, knot dolls and puppets.

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 Marie Winn

Unlike critics who focus on the content of programming for children, Marie Winn asks the question, how does the passive act of watching television affect the developing child’s relationship to the real world? Based on interviews with hundreds of families, teachers and child specialists, this book is a powerful challenge to parents and educators to re-examine their attitudes towards television.

By Rudolf Steiner

This account of the Western path of initiation began appearing in installments in 1904. Steiner openly describes a path of development for all who seek to have real experiences of the spiritual world without sacrificing their practical duties in everyday life. The student is led through the cultivation of reverence and inner tranquility to the development of inner life through the stages of preparation, illumination and initiation.

Steiner describes how we pass through the trials of Fire, Water and Air, and new qualities of feeling, judgement and perception unfold. He shows how the transformation of feelings occurs and indicates the consequences of such practices on our inner and outer lives. A guide to working with the chakras is also given. Finally, the student is led to the first stage of spiritual development: the meeting with the Guardians of the Threshold.

By Ursula Bartning

Play Therapy; Finding the Child in its Own Heaven is a practical book which demonstrates a creative approach to play therapy for mentally handicapped children.

By Rudolf Steiner

This book of lectures, given by Rudolf Steiner, may be recommended as one of the most comprehensive introductions to his philosophy, psychology and practice of education. It describes how the union of science, art, religion and morality forms a vital element in his concept of education. A survey of the changing ideal of humanity is made in relation to education. The rhythmical stages of child development are also discussed.

By Rudolf Steiner

In the eight meditations of A Road to Self-Knowledge the spiritual world is described as it “can be experienced by a soul which sets out on the path to the Spirit in a certain manner … [one can] imagine that what is depicted here has been actually lived through by an individual soul.”

The Threshold of the Spiritual World was also intended by Rudolf Steiner “to complete and amplify” his other writings, for he was concerned to give accounts of the spiritual spheres from “contunally fresh points of view.” He says, however, “It has also been sought to give the description in such a way that it may be read independently, without any knowledge of these other works.”