Hello and welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim John Payne, the author of Simplicity Parenting and The Games Children Play and Beyond Winning, Smart Parenting in a Toxic Youth Sport Environment and a number of other books. This week, the rains have come to the farm and much needed gentle, beautiful rains to help the gardens and the trees and the orchard and we're very happy. We're a little worried and now the rains have come.
This week I've been thinking about the Googlifying, as I think of it, of childhood and what I mean by the Googlifying of childhood is this tendency that we have now to respond to a question that our child has by immediately reaching for the phone, Googling the answer or just simply asking Siri or whatever the answer and then out spits the answer either straight away in text or Alexa or Siri just tells us the answer. And there's nothing we need to ponder anymore. We can find the answer out in an eye blink.
But isn't childhood about pondering? Isn't childhood about thinking and wondering why a grasshopper is like, what's the difference between a grasshopper and a praying mantis? And why can they jump so far? Why does this bug do that? Or that tree do that? Why does this flower look so, so amazing? And the center of it just looks in the way it does? And why? And why? And why? Childhood is all about the question, why? That exploration that causes a child to look closer, to look deeper, to wonder, to compare and to look and ask people around what they think about it and then to go back and look again. It's the basis of so much, well, in some ways people would say perhaps social and scientific engagement. It's the scientist in a child that can walk around wondering and cooking an idea and comparing it within them to other ideas that other kids might have.
That ability to wonder, that ability to live with something, to have a question and sit with it, it just cannot be underestimated how important that is, both in terms of a child's brain development and the healthy myelination of the brain, but also in terms of their social and emotional development. And I would add to that to their sense of wonder in the world and their sense of inquiry. And those two things, wonder and inquiry, are very, very linked.
And that ability to have a question and be able to go into this wondering about it. And the wondering sometimes for younger children can be a little bit wacko, right? It can be all sorts of strange wonderings that just free them from the ties that bind us to this world, to this physical world. It can be all for the younger the child, the more fantastical the wondering will be.
And what a beautiful thing that is, this fantastical wondering of how plants, how critters, how just things that you see, reflections in the glass. And why do I look taller in the glass than I am? Am I really that tall? Why does the glass do that? And the staring at it and coming back and looking at it again, and all kinds of that wondering go on. And then this question of inquiry, of looking deeper and then asking.
It might come up at bedtime where there's just that moment, and you can tell a child's been pondering this all day. And they'll say in the sweetest little voice, you know, Mom, why is it that plants can grow on water? I don't get it. And then out comes this beautiful wondering because of the little outing you had to the park where a child saw water plants and aquatic life like that, botanical life.
Who knows where that will lead a child? It might not lead them to be a marine biologist or whatever, or it might, actually. But it's the wondering, the pondering, and then the inquiry, right? Then them asking you, why is it like that? Now, my suggestion when a child does that is the last thing in the world they need is to have an answer from Google, from Siri, from Alexis. It's just deadening.
It's killing a child's imagination. It's dampening, deadening. It's not what they are looking for.
There, when that question comes up, is our chance to build this little bridge of wondering together and to say to a child, I know. I wonder how it is that they actually, how a plant like that does grow so big and beautiful on water. When we go down next, let's have a closer look.
Yeah, but why, how can it, like, does it have roots that grow, like, down and, like, how does it, like, but it kind of, I think it floats. Like, how, and there is just so many very dear but important questions to a child. And when we wonder with them to say, yeah, right, does it have roots that go down? And that is a really good noticing that it has flowers as well, just like other plants.
Did you saw some with flowers? I saw some too. Now, that conversation is full of connection. It's not about the answer only.
It's good to have the answer come, right, eventually, in one way or another. But it's about the connection that we build in our joining a child in their inquiry and in their wondering. Another aspect of allowing a child to wonder and inquire and not immediately reach for an answer is that they, is that it builds up impulse control.
Now, the brain science tells us all about that. And when you wonder, when you go into that creative inquiry, you start moving parts of the brain, you start linking up, you start myelinating, creating connections that help a child as they grow to have good impulse control. See, it's obvious, right? Think about it.
If a child's allowed to wonder and doesn't get something like instant, like at a click, there it is, there's the answer. But if we allow them space to do that, in terms of their development, there's a direct linkage to them being able to sit with something for longer periods of time and develop that ability to actually go deeper and layer on down and layer on down, which is almost the opposite to instant gratification. And that's my concern about the searing and the googlifying of childhood.
It is a real concern of mine because I work in schools very, very often. I'm in classrooms, you know, week in, week out, visiting with children with social and behavioral problems. And a lot of it, for me, has been speaking with parents, speaking with teachers about allowing a child to actually wonder a little bit more, have a learning process, not so much right and wrong, not so much the answer and it needs to come immediately, but allowing them to layer on down has helped enormously children with so-called ADHD, which I honestly think is a silly term.
It's not attention deficit, it's attention excess. Actually, it's what I call API. It's attention priority issues.
It's just the attention is misprioritized and what's happened is that the top priority for them is wanting an answer directly. So if a teacher starts talking about a math process, let's say, or a science experiment, if a child has been allowed wonder and inquiry and has not been googlified, they can follow the teacher through that process. If every time they've asked a question, we've pulled out our phone, asked Siri, and the answer comes immediately, then we're setting them up on a collision course in school because teachers will generally have a learning process.
That's what a good teacher does. And if our child has been googlified and is used to getting an instant answer to everything, it's boring. School is boring.
Science is boring. But a child who's been allowed to wonder why a frog can sit on a lily pad and why it floats and wonder about that for several days, that's a child who when they're in middle and high school and there's a chemistry experiment going on, has developed that ability and that love in some ways and understanding of process, of learning process, because that wondering leads to inquiry, leads to learning process. And if we want to raise our children to be successful in school, we will keep that phone in our pocket.
We will disable Siri. She won't mind. She doesn't exist.
We will let a child wonder. We'll let them go to the library and look up books as old-fashioned as that is and take a book out and have that book beside their bed and have them just look at it over and over and look at pictures about the pond or about why does a rabbit have such little paws at the front and big ones at the back? Why does it do that and how did that happen? We'll get them a book about this, hold back from a lot of answers and just come alongside them and drift along that long, lazy, lovely river of wondering. Okay, it's still raining.
It's good. The plants are saying thank you. And if you'd like to learn a little bit more about what we're doing at Simplicity Parenting, pop on over to simplicityparenting.com. You'll see a free starter kit with 7 days membership free to our Simplicity Parenting community where you'll find a book reading where I sit down and read the Simplicity Parenting book and all the things that have come up since the publishing of the book with stories and anecdotes and so on.
A lot of home practice guides to support you. And also, if you would like to speak to me personally, there's a link right there at simplicityparenting.com and you can link right into my private family counselling practice and we can talk more. Okay, that's it for now.
I sure hope that was helpful. Okay, bye bye for now.
