It’s 11:30am, you’ve just finished up three hours of work and you have an hour in which to feed your 2 ½ yr old son and ‘attempt’ to get him to take a nap (which he stopped doing about 6 months ago) before your next three hour block of work.  Here’s how it goes down: you plop something down in front of him while you go about cleaning up from the morning’s events; checking and replying to email; preparing and …

This week, we prepare with our friends at Campaign for a Commercial Free Childhood for their upcoming Screen Free Week (April 30-May 6).  We will be sharing many wonderful articles and blog posts that hopefully will serve as inspiration for many of you to join in unplugging for the week with the support of this online community!  Today, we are delighted to share a post from Allison Abramson, a Simplicity Parenting Group Leader in Rhode Island:
 
My family will be going …

We hear so often of the importance of emotional intelligence.  We want desperately for our kids to have it!  In Simplicity Parenting, Kim John Payne puts a high price on it as, well, saying, “In our hopes and dreams for our children, emotional intelligence should probably elbow out that football scholarship, or the viola concert tour, even the stellar report card.”  Having the ability to understand the feelings of others can easily determine how well our children will get along …

Welcome back book-studiers!  We are nearing the end of our discussion.  We have one final chapter to cover next week, and then I hope to cover a few of the (really great) questions which have been brought up in the comments.  All are welcome to join in that discussion, even if this is your first week to find us.
This week – Filtering out the adult world.  One way we protect childhood is by acting as a “filter” for our young …

I spend my Saturday mornings with Kiss 108 FM.
We have an agreement with our pre-teen that he can listen to this radio station for the time that it takes to get to karate each Saturday.  This is the one time in the week that he gets to choose what we listen to in the car, and he absolutely loves it!
I don’t.
I am torn between allowing my son the space to relish this pleasure–with its powerful beat, exuberance, and freedom of …

You may only think of filtering the adult world as keeping screens at bay or monitored.  In his lectures around the country, Kim often emphasizes that filtering screens is the easy part; it’s filtering the adult conversation in our every day lives that can be more difficult.
In search of diverse perspectives on the topic I discovered two bloggers who posted about filtering and I thought they both did an amazing job of sharing their own experiences, giving you lots of …

Okay, this may not be a “small change” – but it isn’t as impossible as you may have thought.
It’s natural for us to worry about things. In this financially unstable time, we worry.  With so much stuff, activities, and negative influences, we worry.  It’s not easy to know where to begin as a parent to put your worries to bed.
Are you ready?  Here it is…
 
 
The more confident you become about who you are as a parent, the less you …

When our firstborn turned one, my husband and I made the call to cancel our cable TV. Since our son was too young for it (and always around), it seemed a wasted monthly payment and an easy place to save 40 dollars a month. It was just an experiment, and I fully expected I’d return in a couple of years to my (then) everyday life of constant streaming news, commercials, and background noise to whatever …

Taken from The Circle, a free forum for simplicity parents…
Angel Table by OakleyOriginals, Some rights reserved
Andrea says:
I started taking inventory about a year ago on our dinner conversations. I thought that we were doing a pretty good job of filtering out the adult world for our 3 young children, but then I realized something.
When my husband and I have plenty of time to catch up, talk and connect outside of mealtimes, it’s really easy for us to keep our …

We are a family who, after moving into our new house a year and a half ago, never got around to installing a land line. Dave and I both have cell phones, which are just more convenient! Not only can we receive (and screen…) calls, but we both have smart phones that can access our email.
The downside to this is that we’re perhaps a bit more tethered to those cells than we would otherwise be. When one …