Hello and welcome to this first edition of the Simplicity Parenting Podcast with me, Kim John Payne. You know, here at Simplicity Central, for years we've dreamt of having a podcast freely available and just putting it out there in the world. It's often been requested and yeah, we just decided to take the leap and put this out and see what you make of it.
We are thrilled to be offering this to you. Let me give a little bit of an overview of what we'll be doing in these podcasts. Primarily, they'll be based around the Simplicity Parenting Diaries.
That's something that I do each week where I distill thoughts that I've had around simplicity and balance and protecting childhood. These thoughts are often catalyzed by workshops and conversations with parents that I do in communities all over the world. And these are just these small little doable nuggets, at least I hope they are, that we've been doing for a while now and putting out in a smaller format and have had great feedback.
So that'll be the core. We'll also be offering from time to time interview series with some of the most inspiring leading thinkers of childhood and parenting in the world, really, and we'll be probably breaking those down into, oh, I'd say like 10, 15 minute, small, doable, kind of bite sized chunks. And then what we'll also do is give you access and put out encore episodes of past Simplicity Parenting Diaries that were only available to a small number of people.
And those topics are very, very wide ranging. And we'll put those out. We thought that would be great to have access to those.
And these will be kind of the best of series because they're the ones that we've received the really great feedback from. Everything will be in small, as I said, doable chunks. None of it will involve sitting for an hour or two listening to the podcast.
And we're just thrilled to be able to offer this to you. And I sure hope it's going to be helpful. So to today's first episode, I wanted to give a slightly bigger picture of, of Simplicity Parenting and just put it a little bit in a nutshell.
What Simplicity Parenting is about and the way it came to be about arose from a concern that so many of us have had that it's all getting too much. That this is, this is just something is not right on a gut level. So many parents around the world now are coming to recognize that something is just not right about the pace of life, what our families are being asked to do, what's being expected of our kids at school and in sports clubs.
It's just flooding our families. It's overwhelming. So therefore, the question arises, what can we do that keeps us as a family in the flow of mainstream life, but at the same time also acts as a gatekeeper to what is essential and what is not essential? What's extraneous? What really doesn't need to happen and happen with that kind of intensity and that kind of frequency in our kids' lives? And also, what's developmentally appropriate? What's asking too much of kids too young? And also, what is coming as the new normal of life? It's asking us, Simplicity Parenting has as a core offering, the ability to be able to have a yardstick of decision making, of discernment, to be able to feel a little more confident when one says yes to that, that'll work for us or no, that's not going to work for us, at least not right now.
That's not right for that age. That will come later. That's at the core of why we wish so many parents, why we wish to simplify and balance our kids' lives.
One of the things we've noticed over the years, both myself and the approaching now 1,000 Simplicity Parenting coaches that are actively engaged in small groups all around the world, it's quite a thought, isn't it, 1,000 Simplicity Parenting coaches and that number just grows and grows every month. What we've noticed is essentially there are four main pillars of simplicity, and some of you who have read the Simplicity Parenting book will know of this and some of you involved in the community will have had access to this. But I'll frame it perhaps in a way that might be interesting.
The first pillar is that of simplifying the environment of a child's home life, simplifying books and toys, simplifying clothes, simplifying cleaning products, lighting, making home just a little bit more of an oasis. There have been tens and tens of thousands of parents around the world who have done this and have been blown away, frankly, with how effective it is when we have less clutter and the home is simpler and easier to navigate. Comments come up often of, wow, my kids are playing so much better together.
You know, wow, they go to sleep so much easier. There's much less fussiness about food. There's been so many comments over the last 15 years or so that have had this kind of pattern, how simplifying clothes, books, toys, all these things that have come to just clutter our houses unnecessarily, when we clean those out and continue to clean them out because they can creep back in, as we know, that has a lasting impact on the way children grow and also on the kind of spaciousness.
Another sort of common reflection is this word space or spaciousness that we as parents also experience, where it's not about the things in a kid's life anymore. It's about us, relationships and connection. That's a common thread through all these four pillars, which brings us to the second pillar of rhythm.
In these podcasts, you'll be hearing quite a bit about rhythm and we walk around that theme quite a lot. There's so many windows we can look through into what are the benefits of rhythm and predictability to a child's life. Right at the get-go, one of the things that our coaches and I have also experienced this need to clarify is that creative and connecting rhythm is very different from boring and disconnecting routine.
And the fascinating thing is it can be the very same task. Is a task done with humor, warmth? Is it done with a child or is a child basically in a very authoritarian way told to do something and chastised when they don't? And it's cold, it's disconnecting. Rhythm is warm and connecting.
And there have been a lot of parents over the years who have said to me that they appreciated that simple clarification of rhythm, because many of us in our own childhood grew up with cold and disconnecting routine and therefore have been hesitant to bring rhythm into our own kids' lives for fear of just not being connected to our kids. And so that's an important differentiation to understand. Rhythm is a point where with all that's going on for our kids, with the very fast-paced life most kids have these days, particularly once they step outside the door, they have got a lot to cope with, way more than most of us when we were growing up had to cope with.
Therefore, it makes rhythm and predictability so much more important in the home, because that's where a child has this feeling of security and safety. That's where a child's whole neurological system can come into rest and come into calm. The high alert, the amber to red alert, which a lot of kids' nervous systems has to default to to get through a regular school day and all the coaching and clubs and things they have to face.
When they come home, when there's things that they know are going to happen in a certain way, that they know that there's going to be when they walk in the door, they know there's going to be a warm welcome, a hug, a touch, a wink. They just know that they are going to be recognized the moment they walk in the door. Sounds like a funny little rhythm, really, but it's an important one.
They know that supper is going to be on the table, that dinner is going to be there in a certain way. They know that they have certain little contributions that they do to help with dinner preparation and clear away. Then they know how bathing and teeth brushing goes.
They know how bedtime goes. And it doesn't matter the age, of course, it's different. They do it differently and at different times for different ages, of course.
But there is a predictability to it. It basically means the fight or flight system, the amygdala, the reptilian brain can stand down and the limbic system and the frontal lobes of the brain can can resume that empathetic, fun loving, normal, natural, human way of being. And can drop the defensiveness and the combativeness that often is a hallmark of when kids come home.
If there's rhythm in the home, there's much, much less pushback. It doesn't go away. But this is the feedback we've had for years now that when rhythm comes in, the degree of pushback eases.
The third pillar is that of scheduling, is that of dialing back the amount of of clubs, the amount of play dates, the amount of activities that our kids, and somehow we seem to be, there's almost like being this unspoken campaign to get our kids into as much as possible. I often think that parenting has almost become like an arms race, or like a contact sport, where we're trying to cram as much into the first 12 years as we would normally cram into the first, as we normally experienced in the first 21 years. And it's really taking its toll on family life, where we feel like barely paid or unpaid taxi or Uber drivers.
You know, it's just, it's unsustainable for many of us. And simplicity parenting is based on questioning this new normal of the super, super fast, too much, too soon, too sexy, too young, and too many activities. And dialing that back to the essential, it doesn't mean no activities, but it does mean thinking carefully about it.
The overscheduling piece will also, one of the things that we've had over and over the feedback is that when parents quit overscheduling, when they give their children more decompression time, when they embrace the gift of boredom, what happens is not only are the children easier, more malleable at home and less brittle and just done, you know, they're just overwhelmed. But a very interesting and consistent piece of feedback is how their academic learning increases. And that's strange, isn't it? Because you'd think we're getting our kids into all this stuff because we want them to do well.
But actually when we give them decompression time, when we allow them the safety release valves of just being at home, hanging out, being just being relaxed and normal, what happens is that the brain's little street sweepers can come out and cleanse and get rid of a lot of these neurotoxins. A lot of these parts of the brain chemistry that are simply not helpful for more cognitive academic learning. And there is a strong relationship between letting, again, the amygdala, the fight or flight brain stand down because that's got an extremely short trauma oriented memory.
But it will overwhelm the second and third raps of the brain, the higher, the higher brain. And what happens is that memorization and really absorbing information at school increases noticeably because now the medium and long term memory is not being flooded. And that's a very, very interesting and consistent piece of feedback that we've received.
The third and the last pillar or pathway of simplicity is that of filtering out the adult world. When I first wrote the Simplicity Parenting book, there were three filters that I applied to adult conversation, but there's a fourth that's developed since then. The first three were before I personally for years would say anything in front of my children, I would ask myself, is it kind? Is it necessary? Is it true? And unless I could answer yes, yes and yes to all three of those, then the answer is no.
Don't say it in front of a child. But given what's been happening in the world over the last decade or so, I've added a fourth. So no longer is just kind, necessary and true.
The fourth is secure. Will it help a child feel more secure, safe, secure and have a base camp to launch out into the world and then return to and launch a little further and then return to? If they hear a lot of conversation about the terrible things that are going on in the world, particularly younger children under the age of nine, they are going to have the feeling that they are not secure, that the world is not a safe place. The world is full of bad guys.
It's just the way little children interpret that information. So what simplicity parenting does is it gives us the confidence to turn off the radio, to turn off the television when children are around. Just don't have them have access to all that kind of stuff.
It gives us the permission to really filter what we're saying in front of children and be able to have what their ears hear, at least from us where we have control, because they'll hear stuff outside the home. Of course they will. But when they're home, they know that that bombardment of bad, scary and traumatic news will not happen.
And so what it does is it gives the child the picture of an outbreath. It's like, oh, I'm home. I'm safe.
I can relax. And that's a beautiful, beautiful thing. The second part of this filtering out the adult world is challenging the ubiquitous nature of screen use for young children.
And here at Simplicity Parenting, it's not necessarily that we're anti-screen, but we're pro-connection, passionately pro-connection. And it's connection to these four aspects that a child so needs to be truly human and to grow, to have, to be strong and empathetic. And these four connections are connection to nature, the natural world, connection to also connection to friends and play.
The third connection is the connection to family. And the fourth and perhaps most crucial connection is connection to one's own values, to this question of who am I? What do I stand for? What do I want to do in my world? What do I wish to embrace, to purchase, to be a part of? And what do I wish not to buy, not to be a part of? And anything that gets in the way of those connections to nature, friends and play, family and self has got to be of acute suspicion. The average child between the ages of nine to 16 now watches, on average, is exposed to nine and a quarter hours of screens per day.
This is up from 2011, the Kaiser Family Foundation found it was around seven and a half. A replicated study now finds it's risen to nine and a quarter hours. The exposure to screens and the marketing, the voracious marketing forces that come through a screen, get in the way of these vital four connections, the connection to nature, connection to friends, family and self.
If kids are watching two, three, four, five hours of screens a day, then that's very precious time when they are not connecting to the things that truly matter. So those are the four pillars of simplicity parenting in a nutshell. Now, for those of you who have heard that before, I hope that gives some interesting angles, some interesting perspectives.
And for those of you who haven't heard that before, I hope that gives a good overview. Now, into the podcast, we'll also be presenting information about loving limits, that come from my book, The Soul of Discipline and how to have discipline shift as a child grows older and how to be able to understand how our discipline gesture will strongly influence a child and how that can be really clarified through three distinct stages of discipline as a child grows. And then we'll also have from time to time, interesting information from a co-authored book I wrote called Beyond Winning, Smart Parenting in a Toxic Youth Sport Environment.
And we will have other information arising from my new book, Being at Your Best When Your Kids Are at Their Worst. That's a book about, for parents, it's for us actually, about our own emotional self-regulation. It's actually the first book that I've written, which has been actually not directly to do with children, but for us in our parenting role.
So there are just tons to look forward to in these podcasts, and I sure hope that this is going to be helpful, useful, uplifting, and just be that little point in your week where you can sit and receive something that might just give that little bit of wind under your wings for the week. OK, that's it. Bye bye now.
