Hello and welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Tim John Payne, the author of Simplicity Parenting. So glad you could join us today, of course. And this week I've been pondering, particularly as I was doing a workshop, in vacation time.
It's holiday time. And we got to talking about the kind of holidays that we remember back from our own childhood. You know, I've asked this question to countless numbers of people over the years about what are the golden holidays, the ones that were really golden, that you that you remember to this to this day, they were they were beautiful.
And they you know, they were special for you. And so many parents over the years I've been asking this question, answer it quite sort of directly, like it doesn't need much thought. They will say things that involve, you know, very, very basic stuff like things, the places they went, the ocean, the things that they did, the the sculptures and sandcastles they built on that beach holiday, the long, long days where they could just just hunker on down and play or maybe up in the mountains, where they could explore the rivers and creeks and streams.
And there was there's a thread that I've come to recognize sort of some patterns. One is it's often in nature, the holidays that are that people remember as being golden and the best of the best, but often had something to do with nature. They very often had this sense of timelessness, a sense of flow, a sense of of, of just an endless day where I can climb a tree and just sit in the branches and watch the clouds and look at their shapes and imagine all kinds of of figures and of what in my family we call cloud painting, you know, with all the different shapes in the clouds.
It also involved connection to other family members, particularly brothers and sisters and mums and dads, often holidays involved, you know, visits with uncles and aunts and nephews, where there was a connection to the people who really count in our lives. And that was another major thread that was running through. But I tell you one that wasn't running through, it's almost entirely absent, is that of money and that of real high velocity holidays.
In all these years of asking that question, no one, not a single person has ever answered stuff like Disney World, Disneyland, like really busy, super, super sort of high velocity, fast moving holidays. You know, we remember them, of course. But when I ask the question, what is the what is the best of all the holidays? You know, there's probably someone one of these days is going to answer Disneyland, I guess, but no one has ever done that.
And I'm guessing that even if someone did answer a really fast paced holiday, it actually would be because there was a connection to family embedded within it, that somehow a really good connection got made. But what can we do, you know, to to have these lovely, spacious, relaxed holidays? And I think that the thing to remember is that it needs to be minimal. It needs to be minimalistic.
You know, there's nothing much we have to provide. You know, will kids be bored for the first day or two? It's kind of likely that they will. And in those first couple of days, if you've gone to the lake or gone somewhere to a river or to a beach or, you know, something very simple, a cabin, a tent, hiking into some lovely waterfall, you know, where you're going to spend some time using that as base camp and exploring out beside a lake.
One of the things that I again, I hear patterns of is, is to stay close to kids in the first couple of days because they can kind of get bored and whingy and clingy and this is boring and there's nothing to do. Some kids don't do that, obviously, but others do, particularly if they're not used to it, right? If it's not a part of the family culture. One of the things to remember is just, you know, do some stuff with the child, like go to the lake, spend, don't don't be setting up a child at the lake and then kind of walking away back to camp and reading a book or, you know, just be proximal, be close and you won't have to do that the entire time, but just engage with a child for the first, you know, day, two, three, until it's almost like siphoning, you know, siphoning their activity until they can start to, to self-create a little bit more.
And then, then it's time to sit maybe on a deck chair somewhere and just be close by, but not have to engage so much and just leave them to it. And of course, the younger ones, you're going to be nearby, particularly if you're near a body of water or whatever that is just in terms of safety, but that higher level of engagement, usually after a wee while, you can back off and just enjoy that kind of lower key moment and let the child really sink down into deeper creative play, because it's that deeper creative play that, that holidays afford us, you know, that a child can just go down into play and play for hours in that, in that wonderful sort of flow space of play. The reason that's, I value that so highly.
And I think it's so important is that a child in those moments is actually decompressing all the busyness of the rest of the year. But even more than that, they're, they're actually digesting. There's a kind of a, like a digestion, a peristalsis or whatever one calls it, but a, a digestion of, of the world.
Like they will be, they will be, little ones will be playing it out, literally. They'll be playing, you know, all the car journeys backwards and forwards between home and school and shells will become the cars and there's the bus stop and you can watch them and it's an amazing scene and they play it out with a kind of a deep but busy energy. And as days go by, I've observed children's play very carefully because of a real interest of mine, the play becomes less frenetic, less unpacking, and then it becomes more of an inner creativity.
But that first kind of layer of play is often just getting it out of their systems. And the hours of a simple holiday where you're not hauling kids around, you're not going on this ride and that ride at the fun fair and then off to a ball game and then back to the hotel and out for supper. And then to, you know, and it's just one thing after another, after another, that doesn't allow kids to unpack.
It basically piles more on what they should be getting less of. And that it's well-meaning. I get it, you know, that we want to have these holidays.
And when I ask people why they have these really fast-paced, high-velocity holidays, the answer often is we don't want our kids to be bored. We want them to have fun. And my response to that is just as I've been saying now, try a relaxed holiday, try a spacious holiday, move in close for a couple of days at most, and then start backing off and being nearby, being proximal, as I mentioned.
And those, and then if you go through that kind of threshold of boredom, and in the Simplicity Parenting book, as some of you will know, I talk about the gift of boredom, because what boredom brings is a chance for self-created activity, that kind of deeper, beautiful, digesting, creative play. So when you're planning your next holiday, or maybe you're in it right now, but think about, think about spaciousness. Think about your golden vacations.
Think about the time when, the times that you just loved, and then create that for your child, because not only will that be a gift right now for the child in the holiday, or in the next holiday, but that'll be a beautiful golden memory for years and years for that child, just like it's been for you. Okay, sure hope that was helpful. Happy holidays.
Bye bye for now.
