Hello and welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim John-Payne. I'm always so glad that you can make time to just listen into this quick little podcast. And just before we begin, I wanted to give you a heads up in case you're at all interested in our Simplicity Parenting Care Professionals Seminar.
These seminars are for care professionals, educators. They're a fairly short six-hour training. One's coming up very soon.
And it's basically, this one is designed around bringing discipline and guidance support to the parents that you work with. And it helps parents be able to put boundaries in place, loving limits in place, be able to support the parents that you work with in your care professional capacity. The workshop's coming up on Saturday, April 22nd at 2 p.m. Eastern and Sunday at 2 p.m. Eastern, April 23rd.
Anyway, that's that. But if you're a care professional or know of a care professional who might be interested in learning a little more, that's the place to go. This week, I've been talking to a few parents and thinking, I've been thinking for quite a while now about how to mix it up in terms of screens and what we're doing in the evenings.
And I was really struck by a couple of parents, and they're just a couple of, you know, countless numbers of others who say, you know what, we largely have gone screen-free, but we still like to have a family movie night on Friday night, let's say, or Saturday night. We like to have a family movie night. And that's our compromise.
And I really appreciate that. I appreciate the thoughtfulness of it, the intentionality of it, because decisions around screens are some of our biggest decisions that we're ever going to make as a parent. There's very few that will be as important to the social, emotional, and brain development, frankly, of our kids about how much of what is not particularly helpful for kids' brain development we actually want to bring into their lives.
My suggestion always when I hear family movie night is based on what parents tell me. And parents say to me often, it's just a lovely night to get cozy, to get connected, just to have that to look forward to, and we choose the movies very carefully, and so on. And picking up on that coziness and that connectedness, for me, that seems to be what parents most value about family movie night, if indeed they have that.
Now, a bunch of parents just go screen-free for little kids, and that's just that. But if you do have a family movie night, what about shifting the thinking just a little bit to have family night, and just take away the word movie. And in that way, you can have one family night with a movie, just like normal.
And then the next Friday, let's say it's a Friday, you have puzzles, and family night's a puzzle night. And the next one, you have games, and it's family game night. And then the third or fourth one, you might have a movie again.
And then after that, you might, and so on. You see, you see where I'm going with this, that the family night is what's important, not the movie. It's the connectedness through family being together.
And another thing that a parent told me they do successfully is that family night always comes with a special comfort food. And, you know, there could be any number of different comfort foods that you have, some are healthier than others. But you could, and what this parent was saying is that it's the food, the making of the food, the kids helping with it, it's the setting of it out, it's the, the food becomes as much a part of the connectedness as the movie, as the puzzle night, as the game night, and so on.
And so, family night is a concept that of connectedness that I think is really worth considering. And even if you don't do movies, right, there's still family night. If you're one of the increasing number of families that don't have screens at all in kids' lives, then it's still just family night, and kids get to really look forward to it, unusually so.
I've spoken to grownups now who had family nights way back, because I've been talking about this for a long time, and it's, it's, their fondest memories are of family nights. They look back on it so, with just such dearness that we did this every Friday, every Saturday, every Sunday night, or whatever night it was, this is what we did together. And it was kind of a thing that something really big had to happen in order for us to not, to not have that.
Incidentally, this is a little sidebar, but a little while ago, a parent was speaking to me about something that others have spoken about over the years too, of old-fashioned day, where they had old-fashioned day, particularly for younger children, where old-fashioned day meant we don't really go anywhere, because in the olden days, they didn't have cars, you know, and we don't really do fancy things. We just do simple things, like in the olden days, and we stay together, and we do things together, and it's our olden days day, and even the food that's cooked, like food in the olden days. Some children even want to dress up like the olden days.
I don't mean to suggest that, that, that being involved in simplicity parenting is about going back into the past. It's absolutely not. It's about raising children for the future, to be independent and creative, self-motivated, problem-solving.
All those things come when children have a simple and balanced childhood, but that, that, you know, to have an olden days day is really really rather sort of sweet idea. So, coming back to that main theme of family, of seeing family night as a night of connection, whatever that brings. It might be cookout, you know, you might have cookout night in the warmer months, or even in the cold months, you know, you huddle around and have cookout night.
It's, there can be myriad different ideas in how to do that, but one thing we can know for sure, this is going to be a very, very dear settling and connecting time for our children now, that they can continue well into their tweens and teens. I know that sounds like really tweens and teens would buy into this. They absolutely can.
If you build this up when it's younger and you have family night, of course, it might change a little bit as the kids get older, but this is a night that kids really do look forward to, even if they don't want to tell you that when they're a bit older. But it's also something, as I mentioned, that they will remember for years and years to come. And just one last quick piece is that I mentioned before young people I'd spoken to, I spoke to someone, oh, it was probably about a year back now, who'd just had their, was just beginning to have their own family, and they fully intended to have family night.
It was like one of their North Star values, that that's what they were going to do, because that's what they were given when they were children. And I thought, well, there's generational issues of all sorts, generational abuse and generational alcoholism, generational this and that, and that's all very hard stuff, but there also could, there's generational connection, there's generational attachment, and one of the ways in which that can be done is through family night. Okay, I sure hope that's helpful.
Bye-bye now.
