Environment for the developing child

So open and trusting are small children, they’re easily influenced – often with lifelong effect. Long before psychiatric focus on childhood experiences, the Jesuits believed the first seven years shape character for life. To Steiner everything experienced in this period affects morality, character and even organ development.1 What people do, say, and especially how they are, manifests their unspoken values, so has major effect. But what about ‘lifeless’ physical environment? This too manifests imprinted value-messages – with selfesteem, respect and behaviour implications. Its physical conditions offer experiential opportunities, and support, hinder or challenge everything we feel, do and even think.