Hello and welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me Kim John Payne. So glad you could join us again this week. This week I've been thinking a little bit more and talking with a few parents about the transitions and particularly about packing up toys for younger kids.
It's often a kind of a flare up, a trigger point for kids when it's time to pack up and they just simply don't want to and they're deep, deep in play. And how do you actually lift them out of that play? Now I mentioned in a previous podcast the whole principle of your world, my world, our world. And you can look back on that, but in a nutshell, it's before you transition a child from play, you draw them up from that deep creative place, not too abruptly, you know, your world is going over and sitting with a child and just being with them.
And they engage you with a little bit of conversation and describe what they've been playing to you. And that brings them up a little bit because they're going to have to transition. So, and then you let them know what your world is like, you know, we're going to be getting in the car soon after mommy or daddy cleans up the counter.
And then you go back and look at their world again. And then you join together in our world, your world, my world, our world. And sometimes you need to double dip a few times and go back into a child's world and just notice and engage.
But what you're doing is that you're bringing them up out of that deep creative play state because just the very act of engaging with you does that. And that's a gentle but pretty effective way of doing it and avoids a lot of the transition tantrums. However, there's something to add to this that can be extremely helpful.
And that's entering into the creative flow of a child's play before packing everything away, before just saying, okay, all the cars, all the dollies now go in the basket because it's too abrupt for many children. So adding into this, your world, my world, our world, is a way to actually stage the toy tidy up before pack up. Now, what I mean by this is that we don't want to become like the play ogre that the child sees us coming and starts to fear for their play and starts to already prepare to fight back.
A way to avoid that is to sit with a child, particularly at that my world and we're about to go into our world, we're about to transition. So you've looked, first of all, and a child's described what the trucks are doing and what the workers are doing or what the drawing is about, whatever it is, then you've gone back and you've done your work, but you've given a child a little bit of a time heads up and you haven't said five minutes to go, two minutes to go, one minute to go. That is as a child locking themselves to the metaphoric radiator, like handcuffing them.
So it's seldom works. But when you've gone back and you're just about to transition into our world, rather than a pack up, a full pack up, what you can do is just do a little bit of preparation. And what I mean by that is that the cars, for example, might all go into the parking lot and then they go into the garage and that might be the box or whatever.
But you have done it entering into a child's imaginative world. And it may be that you just park them all in the parking lot and arrange them all very neatly. And that's enough.
You don't actually have to pack up to transition to going and picking up an older brother or younger sister from school. You can just have them be in the parking lot, or you may choose to put them in the garage, which, of course, is the box. You may choose to put the paints or pencils or crayons all in a nice, tidy line, but not back in the pencil case yet.
And you organise them all standing as straight as soldiers and they're ready to go back in the box. And you just and a child's act of tidying up like that a little bit. What it does is that it still keeps them in their imaginative world and still keeps that connection alive with their play object.
They're tidying it. So it brings them out of play. It brings them out of that, you know, multi level creative play.
It brings them into connection with you because you're helping them tidy up, but not pack away. Not quite yet. And we're tidying up, getting ready.
And what it does is it brings about a feeling of our world because you've gone through your world. That's good. Then there's my world, you know, what I've got to go and get ready.
And I'll just go and pack up lunch so that we can, whatever it is. But then this our world stage is nuanced significantly by tidying up, by getting the play objects all orderly, you know, so it's a little bridge because you're touching the crayons now or the dolls or the cars or whatever it is, you're touching them and just that physical act of an adult touching. But you're not putting them away.
You're not sort of in a child's world, you're interrupting, you're ripping these play objects, which they've really imbued with their imagination. They're representing all kinds of things to a child. Some of them are a bit strange, some of them a bit hard to understand, but or perhaps more accurately, a little bit hard to articulate for a child.
And they don't need to articulate it. We just know they're deeply connected with that doll, with that car, you know, with that paintbrush, whatever it is, with that Lego. But what you are doing is jointly lining things up, putting them ready and ready to be packed up.
Now, in a child's eyes, they could be ready to go back into play as well, but they're still available and they're still there. They haven't gone into the box, not quite yet. Then you're transitioning, the child's now putting their coat on and shoes on, ready to go out or whatever it is they're doing.
Some parents have said that they'll leave the set up there so that when a child comes back, if they think this is going to work, they can go back into play. Other parents have said, no, when they do the little organizing and the tidy up before the pack up, kids get really quite into the swing of this and that a really proper pack up can be done right there and then. So either way actually tends to work.
You know, of course, the choice is yours and how you nuance this is it's a little bit of a feeling it out, isn't it, that you've tidied up and the child really now is ready to pack the cars into the garage. But the garage is also, there's a creative picture around it. It isn't necessarily the box, you know, it's a garage that things go back into.
Dollies, when they're packed up, don't necessarily go into the box or into the basket, they go into their bed to have a little rest. It's really that kind of thing that we're working with younger children so that we're engaged in their imaginative world and our engagement with them. We're walking over to their side of the play bridge and then metaphorically, I guess, just through our engagement, through our tidying up before packing up, we're in a sense holding their hand and leading them to over the bridge, over the river, into what the new activity is of what we're transitioning into.
And lastly, when the kids get into the transition, like they're now putting their coats on and boots or whatever they're doing, whatever the transition is, the transition usually goes a lot better because you've connected with the child. You know, there's this this is hard to describe connection. You've put the, you know, the dollies in their bed and they're just resting or you've taken them to their little table and they're sitting at the table and dollies are having their snack now while we get in the car.
And let's see if they've finished all their food by the time we get back. I wonder if they will. Oh, I know Rosie.
Rosie is very hungry today. We'll see if she eats everything. And and what you're doing is there's this this rich thread of connection between you and your son or daughter that carries you through the putting of the coat on.
And it also, when you're doing this, because imagination is still alive, you've engaged the child's limbic system in any child's brain once you're once they're in that creative space. So when a child's in the limbic system, that's, as I've mentioned before, they're partly responsible for cooperation, collaboration. And because of that, and you're still in that slight creative world, too, a child is then not going into fight or flight.
They're not going to fight you or the chances of them fighting you, you know, to not to get their coat on, to go outside, to get in the car are much, much less because they're simply just in a different part of their being. But guess what? You know, we are, too, because we're talking about whether Rosie the dolly will have eaten all the food that was put out. So pack up should be preceded by tidy up and see how that goes.
A bunch of parents have have just come out smiling from situations like that. It's not magic, but it's pretty great. OK, now, I sure hope that was helpful.
And as always, if you'd like to take a deeper dive into these kinds of challenges in your own family, don't hesitate to reach out to me in my private family counselling practice. You can access that right from SimplicityParenting.com and I'd be thrilled to meet you and work through situations as they arise. Also, we're just about to release in our Simplicity Parenting Essential Goods an amazing workshop.
I'm just so pleased that this workshop that the team have put together into how to help kids transition. It's a very similar theme, but this is how to get children dressed, how to help them be able to get outside with as little fuss as possible. I was speaking to Tara, our friend over at Simplicity Parenting Essential Goods, and she was saying, you know, she was saying, what do you do with mesh, wool and rain slickers? And what do they have in common? And I said, I don't know what mesh, wool and rain slickers have in common.
And she said they're all ingredients for dressing a child to stay comfortable in the rainy season. And that this self-guided mini workshop all with Tara, who's like a children's gear geek, is coming up soon. So see, you can see about that in the show notes, right in the link.
Click right over to that and watch a master gear geek show you how to dress children in as painless a way as possible with the rainy season coming up. OK, bye bye for now.
