Families are the hope of tomorrow. Within our families we first experience loving touch, loving speech, joyful activity, and human relationships. A parent’s love imbues the child with essential human qualities and imparts to the child a way of meeting the world. A family teaches the earliest lessons. At the same time, parenthood is filled with long days, often lonely hours, confusing questions and a loss of instinctive confidence.   

Sophia’s Hearth Family Center serves parents-to be and parents with very young children through educational programs designed to meet their practical and spiritual needs. We offer facilitated playgroups  for parents with their children, parent workshops  and talks of themes of interest to parents and the larger community, and year round childcare for working parents.

In addition, Sophia’s Hearth Family Center provides professional programs for those who work with very young children and parents in a diversity of settings: early childhood classrooms, home and center based childcare programs, programs for parents and children together, support for new mothers, and social work settings.

Sophia's Hearth is also a center for training, research and dissemination. Our journal, the Garden Gate, is published annually.

The Center is especially grateful for the insights of Rudolf Steiner, founder of Waldorf education.  Our work is also informed by the experiences of Hungarian pediatrician Emmi Pikler (1902-1984), gained in her long experience advising the families of the children in her care.  Her name has become synonymous with the reshaping of infant care.  From the time of birth, the main focus is placed upon respecting the child's dignity and competence as well as its self-initiative and individual activity.  The home for infants which Pikler founded in Budapest in 1946 has gained a worldwide reputation for its pediatric research and training, never compromising the life of children.  This home has become internationally known as Loczy.

Our name is taken from two ancient images.  The first is Sophia, whose name represents, most simply, wisdom.  We see her name, for example, in philosophy.  The hearth is a source of gathering, protection, warmth and sustenance for the family.  In linking these two images - wisdom and warmth - we offer each family and teacher an environment that provides support to find the warmth and wisdom that nurture the heart.