Hi, welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim-John Payne. You know, recently I've been talking with parents about difficulties around transitions and problems that seem almost sort of scarily predictable. You just know that there's likely going to be a meltdown or a pushback or a defiance or trouble of some sort.
And we've been talking quite a bit about what you can do in these kinds of situations where on one hand you can feel yourself becoming more and more hesitant and your kids can sort of pick that up and they know it and they sense it and that's not going to go well. Or, as opposed to feeling more solid with what you're doing and being able to have your kids pick up that you're centered and that you mean it. You know, what you're saying you mean.
Because I think kids, they almost do like a cost-benefit analysis. It's like when we did this when we were kids, right? You would listen to your mother or father's voice when they were telling you to do something and it was almost like you would listen in and think, yeah, no, they don't really mean that. Or, oops, yeah, I better do that now.
Yeah, they mean that. So what can we do to help us in those kind of situations? And for me there is nothing better than rhythm. Because if we know that putting on shoes, putting on coats, transitioning into the car, transitioning to bath and bedtime or whatever it is, meal times for tween or teenagers, whatever the predictable point where there's going to be a little bit of tension or a lot of tension, rhythm.
Apply rhythm. Because we know it's predictable, there's a gift in that, frankly, because what we can do is anticipate that this is a problem and plan for it. And what I mean by rhythm is, you know, it's kind of self-explanatory, but just let me say a little bit more.
I mean, if you've got a problem getting your child's clothes on in the morning if you're a parent of a younger child, then make it rhythmical. Make it super predictable. Do it the same way at the same time as close as possible every single day.
If you've got a really little one, you might even sing or hum the same little song or whatever. Make it very, very rhythmical. Actually, one of the moms I was talking to said she had a big step forward in what she described as a nightmarish problem, was that she would set the clothes out in a scarecrow.
She took the advice out of one of my books, and she would have a coat hanger, and on it would be the shirt, and then over that would be the sweater, and then below that would be the pants or the dress, and below that would be the shoes and the socks. She laid it all out in the nighttime, and that just became a ritual. That's what she would do every single night.
She would just hang the coat hanger up on the cupboard door so the child could just see it as she went to sleep. Then in the morning, in she would come, and there was a whole ritual. We do this, then we do this, then we do this.
She just made it super predictable, super rhythmical. She said the problem didn't completely vanish. Occasionally there was a little bit of, I don't like that sweater, I don't like that shirt, I don't like that T-shirt, but it was very easily overcome.
She reported very clearly back in this conversation that, yep, a little bit of pushback, but nowhere near the kind of defiance and the craziness that she had had prior to making it rhythmical. The same thing applies to supper. The same thing applies to bedtimes.
Wherever you have a known problem, and a lot of them are around transitions, but wherever there's something that you pretty much can predict, start as soon as possible to make it rhythmical. Start to get a form around it that, you know, within reason, is very, very similar every single day. Now what that does, and just digging in underneath, like why does that work or why does that at least ease the problem to the extent it does, part of the answer lies in the brain science because what you're doing when you make something rhythmical is that you're creating a little bit of a picture, actually, in the child's brain, in the child's being.
The child carries a picture of, well, we'll use the example of getting dressed in the morning. They wake up and they have a mental picture that's been built up morning after morning after morning because it's done the same way. So they have this mental picture of the way the morning goes, and then when the morning goes that way, then what happens is they have a picture which then comes true.
And what this does is it brings the child into the limbic system of the brain. It brings them into the midbrain, into the brain that's partly responsible for collaboration and cooperation, and that rather than being in the fight-or-flight brain, in the amygdala, in the pushbrain, the defiant brain, the I'm going to fight you back, I'm going to run away, I'm going to be sullen. What happens when we make something rhythmical is that we literally change the child's chemistry.
We change the child's being because every child wants to be safe. Every child wants to trust. And that's what Eric Erickson, if you remember him from Psych 101, when he talked about safety versus lack of safety, trust versus mistrust.
And when we have rhythm, what we do is we say to a child, you are safe, you can trust, because the same thing is happening in the same way every single day. And it doesn't become routine and boring. In fact, far from it, it becomes connecting, and it becomes a point of the day that actually can be somewhat, at least, enjoyed rather than dreaded.
So simplicity, rhythm, and discipline. Hope you enjoyed this tip, and give it a go if you need to. Okay, bye-bye.
