Hello, and welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim John Payne, and to this special series, which is a follow-up to the San Quarantine television series hosted by Jewel. There were a lot of questions that came up in that series, in that television show, which I promised to group and answer. And this is another one of those themes that seemed to come up a lot was around anxiety, but particularly that seemed to orbit around the need for rhythm and predictability.
We had questions come in, for example, about homeschooling, well, all the world is homeschooling now of course, and questions around, you know, how do I prevent procrastination? My kid's just seeming to not get motivated. There were a lot of questions around that. A lot of questions around homework, which is now, you know, just normal work because kids are working at home and incentivizing kids.
How do we get them motivated? Three or four questions around that. And then there were questions around routine and how to get, how to sort of enforce a routine, even when a mum was saying when she hands it off to the dad, who's not so big on routine. So how does that work as well? There were many, many questions that came in, which seemed to orbit around the whole question of needing to get kids into a rhythm, into that kind of stride so that when they are at home and they are doing their schoolwork, there's less pushback, there's more predictability and there's more willingness to take on the work.
Because one of the things that school life does is that it provides a lot of structure. There's a tremendous amount of structure in a school day. And when we find ourselves all of a sudden without that structure, things can start breaking down and a child can quickly become disoriented.
And as many of you know, I make this statement all the time, is that I don't believe in a disobedient child. I just don't believe in disobedience. What I see is disoriented kids.
And you see kids are being disoriented right now and very, very understandably, of course, because of what's happening in their lives, with schools being closed, with social distancing happening, with being isolated from their friends and not being able to meet them in real time, their activities and sports clubs not happening. And it's very, very disorienting for them. A lot of the navigational points of their life have now been taken away.
And so really all they've got is us. And if we can move in close and quick and establish a daily rhythm around what home life is now, what homeschooling is, what we're doing is establishing navigational points where they're different, but they are navigational points. And so if you basically sit, depending on the age of your child, sit in the evening, talk with a friend, talk with a partner and just figure it out, write it down, saying, OK, Monday, here's our rhythm, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, go through it.
OK, the weekend, here's what we do. That's different. Here's our rhythms.
Here's our points of predictability and map it out, because that's exactly what school life does. It not only maps out what's happening at school, but what you've got to do to get ready to go to school, what you've got to do in the evening for older kids with homework and then prepare for the next day. It's not just school that provides a roadmap.
It's that school sits in the middle of that so firmly that there's other stuff that we've got to do to prepare for it. So it makes for a day that is very oriented. Now, given that that's all been stripped away and will be for some time now, if we can actually establish an alternate roadmap, like in here's what we're doing on these days, as I just mentioned, and then orient the kids around that, then we're in really good shape.
I mentioned on the TV show, for example, here at Simplicity Parenting, for many years we have been working with parents to develop rhythm and even, you know, like do little drawings that orient the children and so on. And some parents have had the artistic ability to do that and the confidence and others have not. So we took the step of actually developing a rhythm clock.
This is for younger children, two to eight year olds or thereabouts, where Catherine, our illustrator, drew a beautiful set of about 25, 30 icons and a clock made on stiff card where there's a little arm, a shooting star, actually, and you can clip those icons to the edge of the clock depending on what your day is. They're cut out, so they're not permanent, they're not fixed. And so you can make up a rhythm and the children, younger children, can go to it and look right at it and then see what's coming next.
And then when they're in that activity, the little arm of the clock moves around and the star rests on what they're doing and then they look at it and they can see what's coming next. That security in what's coming next, particularly for younger children when they visually can see it. For older ones, you can write it down, of course.
It doesn't need to just be drawings anymore once a child's eight, nine, ten years old. No worries about that. But that ability to know what is coming next has largely been taken away from kids and we can reestablish it.
The neural pathways are exactly the same. The neural receptors are the same. And so it will be absorbed if we provide it and it provides a new structure and it's a way of orienting the kids, because when kids are disoriented, their behaviour becomes tricky.
Their behaviour, they either become moody or withdrawn. And that's what some people were talking about. Or they push back and refuse.
And other people wrote in around that as well. When we provide this rhythm and predictability in their day and we walk them through it, maybe that evening at supper, remind them again that night before they go to sleep. And this goes for teenagers as well.
I have a teenager at home myself, a 12th grader actually, and a senior. And we do exactly the same thing. We check in on what's coming up the next day.
What are the classes? What help does she need? What help doesn't she need? And we basically map it out. And I can see that even an 18 year old actually is helped by that and then run it the next morning. They get up, you run the rhythm by them again.
If they're little, maybe you do it with an icon or you could use this rhythm clock if you want to, or you can make one up yourself. But then then the day runs. And one more quick word about the kind of rhythm.
Ideally, what we're looking for for kids, just this is in terms of their own biorhythms, is that their thinking work, more of their practical, I mean, their thinking work in a cognitive way, needs to be in the morning, you know, from eight o'clock through ten, ten, thirty. That's when their bookwork, their thinking work can get done. Then around after snack, mid-morning through to lunchtime, that's when a lot about more the more the sort of creative work, painting, drawing, maybe some projects they're taking on that are just a little bit more on the creative side.
And then in the afternoons, that's more practical exercise. Get out, ride a bicycle, go for a run. If they're older, they could work out.
But the day basically is follows this very natural biorhythmical clock of thinking in the morning, more creative work, mid-morning and then practical work in the afternoon and then in the evening, just resting, reading, listening to music. But it's crucial to have that rhythm. Otherwise, older kids will just slop about on sofas all day and they'll start to because of the way their bodies are functioning, because of the hormonal release that's going on in the teenage years.
In this case, it's really, really hard if they don't have an external structure to actually give them the navigational points to get through the day. But that on a different level works exactly the same way to establish a feeling of security and safety for for younger children. So that rhythm and predictability and really planning it out and making it not so much rigid, but having a form around it that's flexible, but that you run every single day.
And initially, if you're not used to this, you'll get pushback almost for sure. And you'll think, well, this is supposed to be good for you. Why aren't you accepting it? If your kids are used to rhythm, it's a whole easier.
It's a different ballgame completely. But if they're not, or even if they're not used to you and establishing rhythms in school, stick with it. We're about four or five weeks into this now, and the feedback I'm getting from countless numbers of parents is that their kids at about week two into week three started accepting the rhythm, started accepting that this is the way the day is going to be oriented and without rigidity to it, of course.
But there is a form of predictability and you are going to stick to it. And this is the way it's going to be. This is what happens so that you have, in a sense, moved from big school where it's a big buildings and lots of people.
It's a it's a big school. And what you're doing is establishing a little school. And in that way, you can have that form and predictability around the rhythm of the day.
But those rhythms don't stop just at the end of the school day. Those rhythms go on and they go on into into the evening where supper time becomes a little more rhythmical. And we can do that now.
Bedtime becomes a little more rhythmical, even for older kids. You know, you talked about the quality of sleep and so on. Teenagers and teenagers are not immune to needing that kind of rhythm in their sleep as well.
So so that that rhythm becomes almost like your it becomes, as one mother described to me, a it's like my grandmother has moved in with me. This kindly, competent grandmother. It becomes like a third partner in the home and the kids get into a slipstream and there's much less pushback.
Is there some front loading of it initially? Yeah, there is. There's some heavy lifting to get this up and going. No doubt about it.
Most kids will push back against it a little bit. Some not, but most will. But once it's established and once the kids know crucially that you believe in it, you're going to do it, that this is the way it's going to happen after a couple of weeks, a week or two, you know, seven, ten, fourteen days, you're then it's easier.
Everything seems to get into its own stride. And then that kind of motivational piece that a number of people wrote in about starts to actually take care of itself to an extent. Of course, we still need to help it along.
OK, hope that's helpful. Bye bye for now.
