Hello and welcome to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim John Payne. This last couple of weeks I have been travelling a little and doing some workshops with some just wonderful parents all around the country and I wanted to read to you, of course, with permission, an email that I received from a parent just after I'd finished doing a workshop in her town and it has to do with her child playing out some of the things that the child was hearing, that he was hearing on the news, in the media, and it was a very telling and beautiful email. This is what she wrote.
I just wanted to share something with you about raising our 12-year-old nephew. We have four other kids aged 30, 28, 22, and 17. We took away his electronics from him due to a bad grade in English and after your workshop today we went home and pulled out an old set of blocks our kids have had for 20 plus years and yes, still get to play occasionally even at their ages.
We told him to build something. Well, he called us up to see his creation and I'd love to be able to attach that photo. He built Trump Tower and a wall in front of it with little blocks signifying illegal immigrants trying to get around the wall and then a few blocks in front of the gates of the wall that were paying illegal immigrants that were going to get through.
Very creative but we obviously need to address the too much adult content area. Now that's the email. There's quite a few layers here, aren't they, to this kind of email.
I don't know if you can hear them coming through. But what really stood out for me was how even at 10, 11, 12, our kids still need to play out what's going on in their lives, particularly things that they hear on the news. Now, you know, children this age often do catch the news on the media in spite of our best efforts to keep that away from them as much as we can.
And when it does come up, it's so sensational these days. There's so much to catch children's attention that the question has got to be, where do they get to actually digest this? And this kind of digestive play that this boy was engaging in, I think is a really, really good example of what we can do by offering opportunities for them to play and to play very simply. Did you catch the mention of the blocks, right? You know, that these were, you know, construction material blocks, Lego type things from these parents had from long ago, which they pulled out, you know, for their nephew that they're very kindly raising to use.
Now, first of all, that is, it requires us to actually turn off the screen. And you probably heard that in the email. It requires us to actually, on one hand, not just turn off the screen, but actually turn off the sensory input, the stimulation that's coming down the screen of all this news, all these images, all this disaster, hard things, in this case, you know, the wall and separation of families at the border and all these things that really must trigger a child seeing families separated, seeing all this kind of thing happen has got to be anxiety producing for a child.
So on one hand, there's a benefit in just turning that stuff off, which is what this mother and father or aunt and uncle actually decided to do. So that's the first benefit. The second benefit, of course, is that it allows the child time to actually play out what they've been seeing, rather than just seeing more and more and more.
Now, you probably also picked up that the, the mom, the aunt here didn't say, you know, build this, build that, do this, do that. She just said, build something, quote, unquote. And look at what he did.
He, he unasked for built images that he was seeing, as I mentioned, that he was seeing that clearly were disturbing to him. And I'm guessing this aunt and uncle, you know, got a real heads up in what they, what they could actually ascertain of what was going on inside their nephew's emotional life. It's often quite a surprise, isn't it? When you see actually what it is that they're playing out and you think, boy, that's really having an effect on them.
It's, it's, it really opens a doorway for us to see what it is they're absorbing and what it is we need to cut back on. So in that way, the third aspect I wanted to mention of this is that allowing children time to play also allows us diagnostic, in a sense, diagnostic ways, real insights into what is happening within their soul, within their emotional life. And all this comes up when we just give our children time away from screens, time away from the radio, the radio plays into it here as well.
Even if the news happens to be on some reputable radio station, it's still on this cycle of repeating, repeating and repeating. And sometimes, you know, I wonder about radio news having as much if not more impact on kids. You know, this, this sort of favorite little story that many of us have heard where children say, you know, I, I really like when you tell me stories without a book, Daddy, because the pictures are so much better.
And yes, my, my kids said that to me too. They loved me telling stories that I was just making up. We had these long sagas of two characters, a very creatively named boy and girl who had all these adventures.
And my kids love those stories because they had better pictures. But if that's true, then the radio also, which doesn't have visual images like television, I wonder about children's developing pictures, sometimes quite sort of scary pictures of what they're actually hearing. If it's true for stories, it's got to be true for the radio, right? Because both are the spoken word.
So dialing that back, dialing television, radio, and in that whole realm of spoken word, I guess, you know, we can't discount our own conversations that we're having in children about disturbing world events. And, you know, as you know, that's a really big part of simplicity. Parenting approach is to filter out adult conversation because it's the same deal.
It's the same thing where kids, if they hear us speaking, will also start to develop images that are perhaps scarier even than what we're talking about. So they can either see the images on TV or the computer. They can hear the images on the radio or hear the images from us.
And all of that is, for me, roughly in the same basket. And turning all that off and allowing a child to decompress, to digest, is essential for their emotional and social and mental health, to give kids time just to lay down their burden and play and play it out. Now, what I'll do is I'll post also the image of the Trump Tower and wall and so on.
I'll post that actually on Facebook, on our Simplicity Parenting Facebook site, along with this little note from this kind uncle and aunt who gave permission to use this. So come on over to Simplicity Parenting, the Facebook page, and you can also see a picture of this 12-year-old boy's rendering of Trump Tower and the wall. OK, I hope that's helpful.
Bye-bye for now.
