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.

Adam Blanning, MD, practices anthroposophic family medicine at the Denver Center for Anthroposophic Therapies (DenverTherapies.com) in Denver, Colorado. He is president of the Anthroposophic Health Association (AHA), an umbrella organization for groups working to bring anthroposophic insights into the realms of medicine, nursing, naturopathy, body therapies, artistic therapies, movement therapies, and counseling. Dr. Blanning lectures and teaches nationally and internationally on topics related to holistic medicine and the dynamics of human development. He is the author of Understanding Deeper Developmental Needs: Holistic Approaches for Challenging Behaviors in Children (2017).