Hello and welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim John Payne, the author of Simplicity Parenting, Soul of Discipline, Games Children Play, and actually soon, upcoming book Being at Your Best When Your Kids are at Their Worst. So this week I was sitting, having lunch, listening to the radio. Kids were often away and I was listening in to a fascinating report on how people in indigenous tribal cultures have found a healing to what is often called generational trauma, with the traumas that were inflicted upon them by invading cultures.
And they've found a healing for that within the renewal and the refinding of their own tribal cultures, the renewal of the language base, the renewal of the artistic traditions, the renewal of the spiritual traditions. Now this was a fascinating report. And for many of us, that would seem, it would seem logical.
It's a celebration that this healing is taking place. But it seems like, yeah, that seems intuitively accurate. I think most of us would get that.
You cut someone off from their culture and that is going to disorient them. And that is going to leave any person open to all kinds of challenges and struggles in their life. But being a parenting guy, a family guy, sort of a children and teens guy, my thoughts immediately turned to what's going on in families.
Because what's happening in families is that we are getting far away, in society in general, to cultivating consciously and really valuing family culture. I was, I took an online course actually recently, and here's a great example of this, is that I took this course. It was a marketing to children's course.
And I could do it online, so I could kind of do it undercover because no one would recognize me. I just put the name of our organization and I was accepted onto the course, no problem. And it was a full day course.
And I did a particular workshop that was all about how to deal with parents and how to have kids purchase products. Now, bear with me because this has a real relevance to what I was talking about with indigenous cultures, because we have, whether you do, I don't know if many of you know this, but we have a new term. Our name for marketers is no longer a parent.
Our new name is purchasing friction. Yeah. Purchasing friction.
They don't refer to us as parents. We are friction to them being able to have children purchase their products. And the entire afternoon workshop that I did was based on how to cut parents away from their children, how to reduce purchasing friction.
In other words, how to de-culture a family. And this was a workshop, quite expensive, was attended by thousands of marketers. Some of the best known, they proudly put up some of the best known products that household name products.
And there were those leaders of their marketing department attending this lecture and attending this workshop. We as a family are under conscious de-culturation. Just as the invaders invaded the shores of homelands of indigenous cultures, the invaders are at our shores and penetrating into the lands of our family culture.
I would almost say this is a metaphor, but it's kind of not. It's really happening. And there's over, is it 17 billion with a B dollars invested per year in marketing to children.
That kind of money is not invested unless it's has high yields of three to 400% yield. I'm learning all this stuff from marketing. I'm pretending I know about it, but that's the figures.
That's the data, right? We are under attack. Our family, our family culture is under attack. We are, as I wrote in the in the simplicity parenting book, living in an undeclared war on childhood.
But this has gone one step further. Now the marketing forces that are out there, which are finding all sorts of ways to make it normal for our kids to have devices in their hands, to be a conduit for their marketing. When I spoke to a parent who was a friend who was visiting the farm here, where I live with my family as to why so much, why they were talking about how much pressure they felt to buy their third grader, their eight year old, a smartphone.
And I said, wow, couldn't have you got just a flip phone, you know, a dumb phone if you really, really needed to be in communication in the city you live in. And they said, no, she would have been mercilessly teased by her friends if she had one of those old phones. She had to be brought bought the latest smartphone, not even an older one, the latest.
And this is at eight, nine years of age. So the marketers have done a brilliant job in forcing parents to have these devices. And then via the device, removing our influence, our guidance, our loving, kind, guiding, caring hand from our children's life, because that's the only way that they can have the child purchase their product is to remove us, hence the term, of course, purchasing friction.
Now, what do we do in the light of that? That's all a pretty negative and dark picture. But it's, but really, I hope it's just an expose, because we need to know what these people are up to, and they're up to plenty. Now, what do we do in the face of all that? And here's where living a simple and balanced life really enables us to enculturate our families, it enables us to have game nights, it enables us to have walks in the forest, it enables us to have games in the backyard or down in the park, it enables us to have meals where we discuss how the day is when it enables us to have bedtimes rich in stories, if a child is young, or if children are older, and just sitting on the edge of the bed having a having a conversation.
All that is family culture. And just as indigenous cultures are now untraumatizing themselves, unstressing, and by wrapping themselves and rediscovering tribal culture, what we can do on a much more local level is rediscover family culture. And that will prevent our children from being prey to these forces that are consciously working to break that down.
If we can provide our children with the culture of our family, then they'll be able to step out into the world with confidence, with ground under their feet, and most of all, with a discernment of what is real and what is not real, what is human, and what is not human, what what humanizes a person and what dehumanizes a person. And they will have that discernment and judgment that comes out of an enculturation, a rich enculturation within our family. And just as the indigenous cultures have done that, we can do that too.
And that's my that's my sincerest hope that the Simplicity Parenting Movement is a vehicle for creating a family culture that secures a child and can be a counterbalance and a filter to these very conscious forces trying to de-culture. So that's that's it for today. Again, come on over to TheSimplicityParenting.com. Access our community area, videos, audios, articles, parent forums, where hundreds and hundreds of parents exchanging ideas and their conundrums with each other, and then getting help from parents all around the world.
All that is over in the community area. Okay, that's it. Hope that was helpful.
Bye bye for now.
