Hello and welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim John Payne. I've been wondering this week a little bit about playdates and how to judge if, you know, you make that decision to organize a playdate. You know how it is, your child comes out at the end of school or kindergarten and is asking to go to a friend's place to play and or even in the morning or that evening is asking you to organize a playdate and you sort of stand at the threshold of a decision like should I do this, should I not, you know, because not a lot of us were raised with playdates.
I mean, you know, I often ask this when I'm visiting with people, you know, is a playdate, you know, something that you had in your life and very only the younger parents ever had playdates. All right, we survived perfectly well without them. And, you know, we're okay-ish, aren't we? Anyway, playdates, they're alive and with us.
So how do we judge whether it's a good idea to have the playdate or not? And one of the things that I think is really helpful is to not sort of so much focus on the playdate, but broaden the perspective out a little bit. And what I mean by that is that when you look at a week, at the child's week, there are some days that are really busy and some days that are a little more relaxed and you're looking for a balance in the overall week. Now, here's something I learned from a mother many years ago.
She was a organizational management consultant, what in the past would be called an efficiency expert, quite a sort of scary profession, right? And what she would do after reading the Simplicity Parenting book and having that really affect her thinking, what she would do is that she would mark down on the calendar at the end of the day, whether it was a C day or an S day, and she would put those letters on the calendar accordingly. Now, some days were C, that stood for calm, and some days were S, and that was for stimulating. So if the day was overall, the balance of the day was calm, up she would write on the calendar the C. If the balance of the day was stimulating and the child had a busy day, it was pretty fragmented and running here, running there, that would be an S day, a stimulating day.
And you can probably see where this is going, right? Because what she was looking for was a balance in the week. The S and the C had to basically balance out. She said some days were C stroke S. They were, you know, they were neither one nor the other, but generally she felt it came down on one side, either in stimulating or calming.
Okay, so how do we use that in terms of play dates? Well, you know, you might be drawing the lines between this already, because when your child is asking you for a play date and you mentally walk back the week or the last, you know, three, four, five days and you think, okay, well, it's Thursday. Monday was pretty calm. Tuesday was crazy.
I was running around all over the place and that got a little bit out of shape. Wednesday, that was still pretty stimulating. And here we are at Thursday.
You know what? No, we're not going to do it because it needs to be a C day. It needs to be calm. Because on the weekend, you know, my brother and sister-in-law are visiting with their two kids and that's going to be almost guaranteed.
That's going to be great fun, but stimulating. So, you know, Thursday, Friday, no play dates. Maybe not even, you know, some of the after an afternoon club.
Maybe we'll even skip that. So what you're doing is looking back on calm and stimulating through the, you know, the week that has just been or so. But you're also looking forward to any times that are going to be stimulating.
Or conversely, you could say, you know what? We're coming up to a pretty quiet weekend. I think a play date might be fine. But you see how it goes, right? And so you look at it and you open up the aperture a little wider.
And I also think it's perfectly reasonable to say that to a child. To just let them know that we've had a busy old week and it looks like a busy weekend coming up and a play date doesn't make any sense. We just need to be a little calmer.
And most kids can go with that because they see that they've had fun earlier in the week. Weekend's coming up. It's going to be a lot of fun.
And we just need to be quiet for a couple of days after school and just get on with our projects and things at home. It helps kids buy in a little bit more. You know, one has to be careful that you're not justifying your decision.
It's not in any way justifying or asking the child's permission. It's just giving them an expanded picture of where your decision is coming from. You're still standing firmly on authoritative ground.
It's just respectfully sharing that with a child. And that usually works really well. And what also can help the whole thing move smoothly is there are times when you say, yes, that would work.
Like I said, we've got a calm weekend coming up. We've had a couple of really nice days at home. Yeah, we can have that play date.
Because when you do that, it registers, hopefully, in the child's mind so that when you have to say no and you do exactly the same thing by looking back at the week, looking forward to what's coming up and saying no, the child starts to get used to that way in which, out of which, you make a decision. And you basically coach the child up to being able to hear the sense in the decision that you've come to. So play dates, calming, stimulating, what's the week been like? What's the week to come? And basing the decision on that is just a really solid thing to do.
Now, the last little piece in this just before we close is that some play dates are calm. You know, you might think that when she plays with that friend, particularly over at our place, they just get involved in projects. It's not particularly crazy.
They hunker on down and do really nice things together. And it doesn't end up with them running around the house screaming, shouting, getting really goofy. And so that's just a footnote to this just before we close is that not all play dates are stimulating.
So you might, again, look at the calendar and say, you know, the play date is fairly calm with that particular child. I can say yes to that or, no, that play date is going to be super stimulating and that just doesn't work in our week. Okay.
Hope that helps. Bye-bye for now.
