Welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim John Payne. So glad you could join us again this week. You know, I was at some graduations.
It's the time of the year here in the Northern Hemisphere where lots of schools are graduating and the kids. And I was really struck by this question of photographing children. And because as I stood just off to one side, I noticed that if I had have been a child standing on stage because I could catch a sort of a sideways glance at it.
If I, I looked out at a sea of parents with their faces obscured. In other words, the children couldn't see the faces of their parents and what was obscuring the faces of the of probably really quite a significant majority of the parents for a good amount of the time was their phones. Now imagine that there's a little child or a teenager on stage, you know, having this quite important moment in their life.
They look out, they see the body shape of their parent, but right where their parents eyes should be is a phone being held up to video them or photograph them. And because of the video incapacity, the phone was held there for a good long period of time, and then it would be put down and then back up, it would go again. And I thought, gosh, you know, when you're going through a moment like that, you really want to see your parents face, you want to see you're looking for, you know, you're in a you're looking for feedback, you're in a particularly little bit of a vulnerable moment in your life.
And it's sort of celebratory, but it's also a little bit, you know, you're under the, the the eyes of everyone else. And, and yet you can't see your parent, it was almost like there was just this sea of, forgive me, but it looked like a sea of robots, of faces of and particularly of eyes being obscured by this pane of glass, otherwise known as a as a phone. And I, I really did feel sorry for these kids that they're having to, to go through that.
And it really did set me wondering about the role of phones in in our family's life, particularly when it comes to photographing, and videoing, and when that really crosses the line, and how ubiquitous it's become, and how difficult it is to really know, when, when it's, when it's just not okay anymore. When is it okay? When is it not okay to photograph our kids, you know, and this is a very individual decision, of course, but it's it did set me thinking, because when children are in an experience, you know, like they're just being so darn cute, you know, or doing something with real vigor, that's when we tend to pull out the phone, because it's always with us, right? So at any moment, for so many of us, we can pull out this phone and photograph it, it's always available, you know, in the olden days, you used to have to go and get a camera, right? So it wasn't so easily done. It's obvious, right? But the, so our kids are in this experience, they're having a moment of where they're being very creative, they're doing something very active, they're, they're, you know, it's, it's just something we want to capture.
And notice the word capture, right? There's something in the word itself, that we're capturing something, imprisoning something. But the, so that's when the phone comes out. But that is, in some ways, exactly the moment the phone shouldn't come out, because the children are having an experience, right? An inner experience, something that is going on for them.
But the moment we pull a camera out, a phone out, I think it is helpful to understand that we are very likely going to lift the child out of their inner experience, to look up, because we're now photographing them. And we might even call out, look, honey, look over here, look here, you know, that's it, that's kind of even more intensely lifting them out of the experience that they're having. And yet, we want to photograph it because it is so special.
And yet we're lifting them out of what makes it special that we are photographing. It's tricky, isn't it? Because we want to have these memories, capture memories, that term again. But the very act of photographing it means we're at risk of breaking the very thing that made it so compelling to pull out the phone and photograph.
So there's this letting children sink down into their inner experience is so important these days, particularly because play and inner experience and activity is how kids basically do a little bit of a brain reset, a nervous system reset. And it's how they digest the world. I've said that a number of times, I think, in these podcasts, but if we're photographing them, it keeps their attention peripheral, it keeps their attention superficial, because they're aware they are being observed.
And that pulls them out, out of that deep creative space, or at least it risks doing that. And that's one of my major concerns about photographing and videoing kids so intensely, so often as has become so normal. It's almost a little bit like we've become the parenting paparazzi, where we're following our kids around, and they can't really have any private moments without the strong chance of us photographing or videoing it.
And the parenting paparazzi is perhaps an unkind term, and I don't mean it to be that, of course. But it is a risk that we don't allow any private, creative, quiet moments in our child's life without photographing, or even more now, turning them into, and this is my second point here, without turning them into family television screen and stage stars, where everything a child does, you know, so much of what they do has to be filmed. Now, if we keep doing that, and we're, and we do it at such a volume, it's so often the children, I've known kids who become very caught up in being filmed.
In other words, it's almost like they're watching themselves in a movie reel, which is the antithesis of deep, creative, selfless experience. It's a little bit like the psychologist from the University of Chicago with this wonderful name, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who was the founder of the flow principle, flow as in F-L-O-W, where he talked about one of the principles of optimal creative experience, which is another way of talking about flow, is when self-consciousness fades, and time fades, and a minute can be an hour or an hour, a minute, and you are into the experience in a deep way. And so, and you are not at all performing that activity, whatever it is, to be able to be noticed by anyone outside yourself, other than doing your absolute best and enjoying and being in flow.
Now, the flow principle has been identified as one of the hallmarks of success in life when we can more and more be in flow. And my worry is that photographing and videoing children so much, they tend to live their life outside their skin, outside themselves, because they're so aware that they're being videoed, and even when they're not being videoed, they're still struggling to be in that deep, creative space. We're lifting them out of flow.
I was watching a little girl, I was visiting a friend, and I was watching their little daughter play, and there were some big windows, and she was playing with her trucks and with her dolls, but she was watching herself play very, very noticeably throughout the entire, oh gosh, it was at least half an hour or more, she was observing herself playing. And at times she would get up and move and do these little dance movements, watching her reflection in the glass, and then she would sit down again, and she would make these rather exaggerated gestures of when she was moving her hands, watching herself play. And I noticed her play was very scattered, there was nothing really moving within her play, like one thing to another, and she never became absorbed in it, because she was watching her image.
And that child had been photographed and photographed, she was a cute little girl, and she'd been photographed and videoed so many times in her life, that she'd now actually developed the habit of playing. And I asked her mum about it a little bit, and she said, I know, I know, and she will be upset if she can't play somewhere where she can't observe herself in a reflection. And there's some work to do there from that mum, I felt like, oh no, you know, and she was a lovely mum, but something had happened there, something really not great had happened, because that little one is not going to get the experience of deep creative decompression.
That's the path of, of really falling in love with your own image. And that's, you know, that's, of course, the narcissistic path. But it's, it concerned me watching that.
The other part, the other aspects of continually photographing and videoing our children is, is that the we're mixing up the virtual life with real life. Now, this is similar to what I was talking about just now with this little girl. But the there's even an acronym for IRL, in real life, versus IVL, which is in virtual life, we're even have an acronym for being in real life.
And you know, when something has an acronym, you know, that it's becoming commonly used that something is up, right? That we now because so much of what's happening in our kids lives in society is in virtual life. We have to now have an acronym to describe in real life that this is happening in reality. It puts me in mind of a child I saw once when I was far in the woods with my own children, actually, and Catherine, my wife, and we were walking in the in the redwood forests of California.
It was a very special place, of course. And there was a massive big fallen redwood tree. It really quite or awesome.
I mean, it was just that the size of this, and there was a child, I'm guessing about, oh, nine or 10, who was walking along, he'd climbed up and was walking along this fallen giant that, you know, many times, the girth of it many times, this child's size, and completely captivated by this, by this awesomeness, and was feeling the bark was standing very quiet, very quietly, and, and just in this moment of reverence for nature, and for the size and the beauty of this tree, and you can probably see where I'm going, right, the parents pulled out their phones, and started filming it. And one of the parents called out, and she looked, she looked the little girl that the 12 year old, 10, 11, 12 year old looked up, and just deflated her shoulders, she just sunk, that look of awe and reverence was wiped from her face. And she said, Go ahead, I'll never forget what she said, she said, Go ahead, go on, take a video, because if there's not a video, it never happened.
Right. And so she stood there in this kind of just disappointed, slightly fresh, I gotta confess way she was so tired of being videoed. And then she looked over and said, Are you done? And they said, Yes, honey, but could you just walk to the end, just walk to the end? No, a little slower.
And it was like she was on a catwalk on some fashion show. And they had the parents unwittingly good people, I'm sure, but they had unwittingly turned this child's walk along a fallen giant redwood, with all the awesomeness of that, into a fashion catwalk, where the child was being filmed and very aware of being filmed. So the child then just sort of turned around, and just walked away, and just walked off, and then walked into the woods, and just wanted to get away from being photographed and filmed.
And that that image is really that came up for me very strongly when I watched the parenting paparazzi at this, at this graduation recently. Now, what can we actually do? How do we how do we sort of pull this thing back in that is going on so much now? And one of the ways I think that that we can at least begin to get a hold of this is, firstly, and honestly, this through consciousness is to say, I'm gonna stop doing this so much. I do not need so many photographs, like literally hundreds and hundreds and hundreds, maybe even thousands, because we no longer have to be careful with what pictures we take, because they're expensive.
And we'd have to go off to the, you know, to the photograph store or whatever, and have them developed. And that, you know, that cost 10, 12, $15, or whatever. Now, it's free.
And part of the issue is that, is that, and what we might be able to do to help is to say to ourselves, you know, the photographs I'm taking, I am actually going to develop a photograph album, I'm going to limit myself to taking fewer photographs, and much fewer videos, because the videos pin a child to the screen, as opposed to having a real photograph album in their hands. Do you remember having a photograph album in your hands and flipping through those well known photographs and smiling and having that photograph album be right there on the coffee table? Ours is the one that's one of the ones that we particularly love is underneath the shelf on the coffee table. And can't tell you how many times my kids take out that photograph album and just leaf through it and enjoy it and smile and just absorbed in it.
But there's maybe only three, four, maybe half a dozen photographs in any one year of their life, maybe some more at other times. But that was because we were taking photographs with a camera and getting them getting them developed. And I wonder if that's a way to start rationalizing is that first of all, we get away from screens taking pictures, and only being able to view on a screen.
And when the picture is taken, immediately you turn the phone to them and show themselves in the activity that they were doing, that they've now stopped to look at themselves in what they were doing past tense. I mean, honestly, it's a little bit bizarre, isn't it? When we look at it in this way, what about going going well forward, I don't think it's back going forward to having photograph albums again, limiting the number of times we take photographs. What about even one mom was saying to me, she's even gone back to not using her phone.
So the phone doesn't become this, this sort of great altar, this great sort of monolithic presence that is everything is used for. She's actually it's a digital camera, but she's gone back to using a digital camera. And in that way, you know, she packs it because she knows there'll be moments that she'll take photographs of, but it's not every last little detail.
What about we go back to having photograph albums or go forward to having photograph albums, where we we can, it's very easy, of course, to develop digital photographs. And we put something in the hands of our children. And over the years, we develop these volumes that the children can pull off the shelves when they're older, they can show their own children.
They're not digital, they become they become IRL, they become a little bit more in real life, you can touch them, you can feel them, you can turn the page, they're real, they're much, much more real than a digital image on a phone or a screen. And they become a treasure, they become a real treasure of the family. Most of all, what I'm hoping is that we can start to get over the spell that that the availability of of taking photographs and and posting them here and then there and then, or just having them on our phones.
I hope we can get over that sort of that that sort of the new normal of doing this, start to rationalise it, start to have have something be a little bit special about a photograph. And my thought in wrapping up this particular podcast today is, you know, what is this principle of what is rare is is precious, right? We know that what is rare is precious. So what about we make photographs rare? And so in doing that, we make them we make them precious.
Okay, so that's it for today. Don't forget, if you would like to talk with me personally, you can go right to the website and you'll see a consult with Kim, I think it's called, it's right there on the website, if you would like to do that. It's something I so enjoy to do in my in my family counselling practice is meet with parents individually.
It's just the best thing. But I hope today's information or just thoughts that I have musings on photographing children has been of some interest and maybe even some help. Okay, bye bye for now.
