Hello and welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim John Payne. Always grateful that you can carve out the time just to join these simple brief little podcasts. Today I want to talk about kids who enjoy after-school activities, who enjoy playdates, just they come out of school and, you know, for school-aged kids, of course, they come out of school and it's almost as if they're on a roll, you know, and they want to do this and they want to do that, but especially what comes into this is after-school activities.
And what I've heard over the years, and I totally get it, is that the kids love it. But my kids love it, you know, and I hear that a lot when I sort of, you know, suggest having things be manageable and not having kids do too many practices to, particularly in sports, but music lessons and on top of that playdates. And it's a fairly big part of the simplicity parenting whole way of approaching things, is to keep that in whack, you know, so it just doesn't get overwhelming.
And then alongside that we have as parents this dilemma that the kids seem to really like it. They seem, you know, sometimes they might get a bit grumpy about it and some kids more than others, but a lot of children really say that they want to actually do it. They want to do like two, three, four nights a week ballet, two, three, four nights a week soccer practice and or martial arts or, and so it goes.
And I want to question this whole aspect of they love it, because whilst we hear that from children, and they're just children, of course, that, you know, they may say that, and it's very true for them. But what is really speaking in those moments, I feel often it's just worth pausing, because what's speaking is adrenaline and cortisol, and not so much the sort of balanced nervous system. The adrenaline and cortisol says, but I love it, and I don't want to miss out.
And it's just exciting, and I'm on a roll, and I want to keep doing this, and everyone's doing it. And I, right, that's the voice of the adrenaline and the cortisol. And particularly of the sympathetic nervous system, the stimulation, the reactivity, that kind of taking in and feeling aroused and stimulated and on the go.
It's all fine. It's all good. But that's, that's only one of two voices.
The other voice of the parasympathetic nervous system is an entirely different voice. That voice is saying, I need to rest. I need to have calm.
I need to reset. I need to digest all that the day has brought up for me. I need to go home.
I need some calm in order to balance. Only we don't often hear that voice in kids occasionally. But just the nature of the stimulated voice is that it's faster.
It comes out quicker. It's more exciting. And so we're going to hear that voice.
But as parents, I think we've got to listen in a little bit more to that unspoken voice of calm, of, and particularly of digestion. A lot comes at a child in a day at school, and they need space to decompress. They need those safety release valves.
Now, I think most of us are onto this, particularly people who listen to a podcast like this. But the thing that's harder to, harder to sort of understand and kind of honor is that that voice we don't often hear. Sometimes the voice we mainly hear is that of I love it.
And then we then we come to, you know, obviously it leads us think, well, I don't want to deny my child, my son, my daughter, my child, that experience, because they really do seem to love it and get so much out of it. All right, now I get that. But there's a line that gets crossed.
And it's really hard to know when that line is being crossed. Because so much of modern culture is asking kids involved, for example, in after school activities, like, like soccer or ballet or martial arts or whatever it is, it asks them for fairly heavy involvement. It asks them for one, two, three nights a week involvement.
And then very often, it'll be asking them for a competitive attendance as well with travel teams and games against other clubs and against other towns and so on and so on. And we start to get drawn into this web of of buying into the sympathetic nervous systems voice, we start to get drawn into this, this FOMO, this fear of missing out. And our kids get bought into it.
And if we're not careful, we do too. And and one of the ways to to find this narrow little path through the but I love it. And the fear of missing out is to listen to what the child needs to have a balanced nervous system.
Because the balance, as I've mentioned before, in these podcasts, between the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system, that's a resilient child right there. There is a child who is going to be able to roll with it is resilient. The the child who has this fear of missing out and particularly this, but I love it.
And I want to do more and more and more of it. That's a child who starts to develop anxiety issues, where the intensity of the activity spills over into being competitive, and then even aggressively competitive. And that doesn't stay just within the sports that starts moving out into sibling relationships and in all kinds of places in relationship to us as parents as well.
So the the balance but in the nervous system, not only has to do with resiliency, but it has to do with malleability. I often think that when when there's a balance between getting like a child being high and stimulated and really enjoying what they're doing, but also getting calm that time downtime, decompression and digestion time, when issues come up as they still will, even if you have a very balanced life, it's more malleable, you can find your way through it. It's softer, it's more open to suggestion, it's it's problem solving and being able to lean into that.
Whereas a child who is is is really running on adrenaline and cortisol, and that stimulation, it's that's not a listening quality, it's brittle. Rather than being malleable, there's a kind of brittleness that comes into it. So all in all, I guess what I'm saying is that when a child says, I love it, I think what they're kind of saying as well, is is my, my sympathetic nervous system loves it.
And and there's more to the eye of a child than that one sidedness of of their nervous system. And it's, you know, the the two, three, four nights a week, it's, it's just often too much for kids. And they need that balance.
Now, the balance is us leaning into our gut instinct, the balance is saying, well, how, how much of this is actually healthy? And, and sort of laying that right alongside what the coaches are telling you, no, you got to come to four nights a week or the dance instructor, no, it's very common to hear this kind of no, you've got to come four nights a week, and there's going to be a double practice, double rehearsal prior, prior to to performance, and we're taking it and where and you start and then it's really tough to say to a child, actually, we're not going to do so much of that. Or like there was one mom and dad I was speaking with, who actually had to take the child off the travel team, because it was four nights a week practice at least one evening game and always one weekend game. And the child was becoming grumpy, a lot of pushback, a lot of brittleness within their emotions, but they were still saying they love it.
When the parents had the courage to step in and say, well, let's just do rec league, where there's a game and one practice. Let's just do let's do that. And maybe there's, you know, there's space to we can go see a game occasionally.
And the child pushed back and was grumpy about it, because they were running on adrenaline. But it was only a couple of weeks into the process, where they saw a change. Initially, it was subtle.
And then as the weeks rolled on, it became more and more obvious how overwhelmed the child was. And how now they even actually said, it's funny, I'm talking about the voice of this, the but I love it voice. They even said the child's voice started changing, and they weren't stuttering so much or being being sort of staccato in their voice, they were calmer.
And the whole tone of the child of this particular was a boy's behavior towards his sibling started to become much more cooperative. So when we are confronted with the but I love it, I think we also need to pause and say yes, you do. And it's so lovely that you do.
And we as your as your guardian, as your mom or dad, we also know what is what is right, and what is balanced for you. And to keep those two things to keep them to keep them in order. And I think this is not easy these days.
But I did want to challenge in this little podcast today, this whole notion of doing it, because a child says they love it. They love ice cream, too. They love sugar, but we don't give them too much of that.
We know how much is enough. And it's just like this for afternoon activities out of school weekend activities as well. Okay, hope that was in some ways helpful.
Bye bye for now.
