Hello and welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Ken John Payne, so glad you could join us again today. You know, this week I've been speaking with a couple of parents who were talking about the busyness of life and how different things have been of late, you know, where life has just slowed down that little bit or a lot more recently, and many of us have experienced that of course, and they were musing together with me about how when you are running around a lot with your kids, when there's a lot of classes going on, after school activities going on, play dates, and you know, if you've got a couple of kids, it really starts to add up, and there was just this moment when there was such a telling comment from one of the parents when they said, you know, running around like this kind of puts the kids in charge, and they feel like we have an obligation, we as parents have an obligation to serve them, to get them to where they want to go, to get them to things that they enjoy doing, and that we are there basically as unpaid taxi drivers, and how that attitude builds out, and it doesn't in a sense bracket itself, that it builds out into attitude when they get home, where they still figure they're in charge, because that's the message they've been given over and over, because we have every single day so many schedules, so many things to do, and it's like we are there to serve the children, and they get this message that they're kind of there to be served, and one mum said to me, you know, it's been really interesting because over these past months, when we haven't been able to do this, the kids have calmed down a whole bunch more, but it's not just that they're calmer and feeling more centred. What this mum was also noticing was that the degree to which the children feel they should be served has dropped away to being negligible.
One of the things that another dad said to me, who made a very, very similar observation, was that the kids are pitching in now more with chores, and that was really interesting too, because it relates a little bit, doesn't it, to that being served, to the whole idea that children just should have meals cooked for them, and they sit down and eat and walk away, or they drop things on the floor and that should be picked up, or that they get out of bed and leave it to be made, or, you know, so on and so on. And the fact that that might be coming, or one of the key components of addressing that, is to dial back scheduling, was almost like an unveiling of a new layer of this for me, because that kind of non-bracketing that I spoke about when we're running around after kids, doing so much, and therefore that spills over, it isn't bracketed, and it spills right over into other areas of family life. I don't know why I haven't thought of it, frankly, I know, but it's a pretty intuitive one, isn't it? And it's pretty obvious that they get that kind of message, and then it makes everything much more difficult when things like chores come up, or things like when we're giving directions for bedtime, or, you know, we're actually giving instructions and directions to, you know, it's time to get in the car now, it's time to go to school now, it's whatever it is, whatever aspect of life it is.
If we've been running around after our kids a lot, and they've got the message that we are there to serve them, and to get them to where they gain pleasure, right? Then when we try to give them directions, instructions, it just makes complete sense that that's going to make things difficult, because they're used to being served. It's not a particularly complicated thought, but it wasn't until this big global wide slowdown has been happening, that I think a number of things are coming to the surface. And this certainly is one of them.
And so I said to these parents, you know, what are your plans? You know, when life resumes, when things go back to normal a little bit more, what do you plan? They said, we are absolutely going to keep scheduling to a minimum. Previously, we'd been, you know, thought we'd been doing okay, but really, most afternoons with two kids, there were things that we were running them around to do. And their intention now is to dial that way back.
One dad said to me about a very similar issue, said, you know, I'm only just going to do one week, you know, mom and dad are only going to just do one afternoon a week. That's it. And we get to choose what that is.
And it's it might be a play date. It could be a sports club. But if the child's doing sports, and he wants to be on a team, then play don't play dates don't happen through the week, something on the weekend might happen.
It's just easy and organic. But we are stopping running our kids around. I guess the final piece on this, which was lovely for me to hear was also how the via the stopping of running kids to around to all these different activities has meant a greater connection and closeness to parents.
And I know a whole lot of us are saying, you know, we got to really hang on to this when life gets back to the to the sort of possibilities where we're, you know, it's all opening up again, and we can do all sorts of stuff. We're not going to overcompensate by getting our kids into every club possible, you know, except every play date possible, and so on every after school activity that that might come up, we're going to be much, much more discerning. Because the silver lining within this very difficult time, the tragedy of it is, for so many of us, a connection with our kids, and I know it's been difficult, other aspects of it have been tremendously difficult.
But I'm hearing this from a lot of parents that the daily run around is definitely going to slow down and stay slowed. Music to my ears. Okay, hope that was helpful.
Bye bye for now.
