Hello and welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim John Payne. This week I am answering a number of questions that came up from a recent webinar. Some of you may have caught that webinar that we did together with my dear friend and colleague Jewel, the singer songwriter and author and just all round wonderful person and deep thinker.
And also with the multi Grammy Award winning singer, Brad Paisley, who was just wonderful to have on the show, talk about his own journey through parenting as well. It's just a wonderful opportunity to be with those two people. And a number of questions came up in the webinar that I wanted to now start to group together and answer and do my very best to do that.
So it's helpful and makes meaning to the many thousands of people who are on that webinar and to others, of course, who couldn't make it. One of the probably right at the top of the list of the questions being asked were orbiting around the question of screens, screen time, issues around screen addiction, issues around how much time should children spend on screens. There were quite a few questions from parents that had that tinge of concern, of serious concern really, about the amount of time kids are being asked now to spend on screens, particularly now.
And I wanted to begin to address those with a slightly larger aperture and then move in close. And that's a question that I think starts to address more the big picture around screens. And that, for me, is a question of aloneness versus loneliness.
Now bear with me, because that may not seem like it relates directly to screens, but we are being told more and more that we are social animals. I've heard that term over and over, that we're social animals. We need to be together.
We need to... So in this time of isolation, we need to be seeking each other out. We need to group together. And if we can't do it in person, then we will seek other ways to do it virtually and online.
And that that is good and that is okay, but a lot of people are now starting to question that. And a lot of people on the webinar also were questioning that. Sure enough, we are social animals.
I get that. And I'm not going to just sort of rail against screens and be anti-screen. I don't want to be anti-anything really.
But what has happened for us in our evolution of the species is that one of the things that sets us apart and helps us be human is our ability to know the difference between aloneness and loneliness. And if we understand the difference between those two, this is a fundamental human quality that we can be alone without panic, without feeling that we need to seek the herd, so to speak, if we're social animals. If that's all there is to it, then we'll be constantly seeking the herd.
But that's not all there is to it. Just a little bit of closer inspection and a little deeper thought about this has led me to the feeling that we can survive on our own. One of the things that Jewel spoke about so beautifully in this webinar was we are human.
We were meant for this. We can get through these problems. We are human.
And Jewel was talking about speaking in that way to her little boy. What a lucky little boy to have that message be given to him by his mama is that we are human. And if that is true, which it most certainly is, then the ability to have children have this message that they do not always need to seek the herd, that they don't always have to go with the crowd, that it's not a desperate thing to be on one's own.
In fact, to be on one's own is when some of the greatest things happen, when some of the greatest discoveries, albeit simple little discoveries of a project, of a construction project when you're a young child, to enormous social, artistic, mathematical breakthroughs have happened when people have been out walking on their own, sitting alone, contemplating. Some of the greatest social advances outwardly have happened because we've allowed ourselves aloneness, but also some of the biggest breakthroughs inwardly, just for ourselves, have happened when we've been alone. I think most of us would probably agree with that.
And this aloneness allows us the ability to hear our voice within. The distractions, the wonderful fun, social events, but nevertheless distractions to that quiet inner voice when we're seeking it are something that I think most of us recognize. And yet, at the moment, there seems to be almost a frenzy of wishing to stay in contact through social networking, particularly through video conferencing.
And there seems to be this frenetic energy right now about keeping children in contact with each other. An example of this came up recently when a friend of mine who works as a kindergarten teacher in an early childhood department, together with her colleagues, was discussing what they should do about keeping the children connected and how could they do that. Because part of this aspect of being social animals is absolutely true.
There's, of course, no denying it. And it's a beautiful thing to be connected with one's friends and family. And so the question came up, should we allow these three and four-year-olds, should we support it? And should we, as a school, start having video conferences? Should we start having technology link these children? And this friend and I had been in contact for quite some time.
And she recalled a story that I had told, one of my favorite stories, which she then relayed to her colleagues, which, in her estimation, really changed the nature of the conversation. The story went something like this. One day I came home and I found an unusual situation in that all the photographs that hung on the wall of family, some of them were missing.
And I wondered what was happening. I knew my daughter hadn't been very well. She'd had a little bit of a flu and cold.
And I asked Catherine, my wife, how she was doing. She said, oh, the fever's really gone up today. She's had a rough day.
And so, of course, right away I went into her room and there she was. And she was asleep, obviously very fevered. And all around her were these photographs of family that she'd put around her like a nest.
But inside those photographs and in and around were dozens and dozens of letters and drawings and little treasures of this and that that her extended family had sent to her over the years. Because in our family, we did very little videoconferencing with extended family who are all around the world. And even those who are a little bit closer, we still didn't do it very much at all.
But what we did for many years was have our children write letters, real letters, you know, with, remember, paper and pencil and everything. They would do drawings. They would collect little things, this and that, from their walks to send to Grandma, to send to Nana, to send to an uncle.
And one of their grandparents only lived an hour and a half away, but they loved sending her things. And they would come home and they would do a drawing when they were little or when they were a little bit older. They would laboriously sit there with their tongue hanging out the corner of their mouth writing a note to Nana and Grandpa or to Uncle and Aunt about what it was and what they saw.
And the next day would go on and they'd pick it up a little bit more. And they would spend three or four days in this space of Nana-ness, you know, many, many hours of making her something or of sending. I remember once they sent a cousin little, they made little cutouts of a dolly clothing, just small cutouts and drew them, like drew the trousers and the shoes and the sweater and they made all these clothes and they sent off to a cousin.
Days and hours of living within that Nana-ness, cousin-ness, uncle-ness, carrying those people in their hearts. And then the envelope comes out and the letter goes in or the little four-leaf clover they found or the craft project they've been doing. And they slowly write.
I remember they used to actually draw stamps on it and I had to put it on the left-hand side to make room for the real stamp. But they even used to draw stamps and then down to the mailbox and lifting them up and popping it in. And then for a week or 10 days, they check the mail every day.
They check it. It's Nana. So they're still in Nana-land, cousin-land.
They're still in aunt-uncle-land, friend-land. They're still carrying them. So now it's a week, even a week and a half, two weeks go by and then the big day comes where the letter comes back and there is their name right on the letter, like a big girl.
There was their name and they come home. They run up and, Daddy, look, look, Nana has written back. Look, cousin has written.
And they open it and they find perhaps another little project or another drawing or something their cousin has found or their friend who's moved far away to a different country has found. And they treasure it so much so that when my daughter, after all those years, was sick and now she was a bigger girl in her tween years. She was about 11, 12 years old.
There she had put all these letters, which I didn't even know she kept, all the drawings, all the treasures she kept in a box. And when she was feeling very, very sick, there they were around her like a nest of security, like a circle of safety. There all the people were around her when she needed them most.
And this was a beautiful thing because as good as video conferencing might be, can you really put that around you? Can you put those ones and zeros around you? They're ephemeral. They go, they come, they easy come, easy go. They're gone.
They evaporate. But these treasures, which have continued to be collected in this box, I'm guessing my child, well, I'm very, very likely that should she have a child when she grows up, she'll be showing them to her, her child, and perhaps her child and her child. And these treasures will become something generational, perhaps.
If not, that's okay too. But there's something tangible that you can carry in your heart about this. And equally important is that the video conference, which is very, it's, I mean, it's okay.
I don't want to be silly about it, but it's, it's here and then it's gone. And as, and then on with the day, very, very quick, it's a quick, cheap, easy hit of grandma-ness, right? There it is. But a letter, a drawing, a treasure, that's three weeks of grandma-ness.
That's, that's long periods of time, taking all that into your sleep and dreaming about these people and the, the, the real human connection, if we are social animals, which we are, of course, can be done in a way that does not involve video conferencing as our main way of doing it. It's a way of being social, but it's a way of being truly social and having that social impulse run deep within us. So, this story was told to this group of kindergarten teachers and they decided to replicate it.
They decided that rather than having video conferences for young children, they started to, they put word out to the parents, could the children collect things on walks, things that would be okay to send through the mail? Could they start drawing, doing drawings for each other of things that they were doing, like a drawing each day of something they were doing? The parents loved it because it gave them a focus, like a drawing each day of something. And then they had a little rotation that they, they worked out of who was sending which envelope to whom. And each day, the journey down to the mailbox, since this decision was made, has been a completely joyful one.
And all around the walls in children's bedrooms have started going up, all the drawings and the lovely, there's something of another person's soul, perhaps, something of their inner self shines through when a drawing is sent or when you see their handwriting. And all around the walls, quite unexpectedly, and it really reminded me of my daughter when she was sick. Now, these children aren't sick.
They're just living life as they are. But there are the drawings up and around the walls. And this has been happening in household after household.
So, just in closing now, when we allow our children this time of being alone, it doesn't exclude being social. Because it's the superficial social is when you see someone. But the deeper social is carrying that someone within you.
And allowing that space is, for me, to be celebrated and to be given time. And the other aspect of allowing children to experience aloneness and not have it be confused with loneliness is when we allow them time for deep, deep creative play, not quickly going to the iPad or tablet and wanting to social network and video conference, but time for deep, creative play. Because it's in that deep, creative play, that's when the pictures arise.
That's when, if we, another example, if we tell a story, that's when a child's picture thinking arises, all on her own, alone. She's developing he, they are developing this inner picture. And it is that deep imaginative play or storytelling which cultivates the picture within, which later becomes the thought within.
This becomes our cognitive ability to think through issues, to be able, in a sense, to be able to follow our true north of our own values, of our own thoughts, as opposed to the magnetic north of what everyone else is doing. And that, that ultimately is what we wish for our child as they go out into the world, as they go to school, as they go into middle or high school, college, and out into the world, is their ability to follow their own moral compass, but to follow their own moral compass means they need to have time to be on their own. And in this time now, can we give children the time to be alone and truly, truly welcome it, and not try and turn away from it, and frenetically try to connect them via virtual networks, because it is virtual, it is not real, not really, not in comparison to what else we can do.
I hope that's helpful, big subject, okay, bye bye for now.
