Hello and welcome back to the Simplicity Parenting Podcast with me, Kim John Payne. As always, just thrilled that you could carve out a little bit of time to join us. This week I've been thinking about how to help transition wobbles.
And what I mean by that is that when children are going through change, times of change, stressful times, particularly when they're transitioning from one phase to another in their young lives, how can we actually support them through that? What are some really practical things that we can do? I want to focus first of all on a change that comes up around 7.5, 8 through to about 9.5 or 10. It's often called the nine-year change, but I think it's a phase that kids go through. Some started a little earlier, some a little later, but most kids definitely go through this phase.
It's a phase when, in a sense, they're saying to us, I'm not a baby anymore. And they might even say that I'm not a baby anymore. You know, but what we're saying inwardly is, yeah, but you're not a teenager yet either.
Even though your behavior looks a little like it sometimes. And it's that in-between stage. It's a cuspian stage.
Carl Jung even called it the age of orphan fantasy, where kids will ground themselves so much. They come into the world so much. They get a little more independent or a lot more independent.
They wake up to the world and they ask some really fundamental questions. They can now verbalize them. And I guess Jung thought, you know, like, what is my family of origin is one of them.
Like, who am I? Who really am I now? And it's like when they were little, they moved from me once, you know, or Johnny wants me once to then I want. But this is now on a whole nother level. It's almost like it's transposed itself forward.
And now there's another stage of the I, of the Ich, of the me coming in. And it's not without its wobbliness, really. And so what to do? What are some basic things that can be done? Because I think of this as a lot of transitions are as a little bit of a doorway, a threshold, so to speak.
And kids are looking into the future and they see it's really kind of interesting, the big kids and what they're doing and so on. But it's also a little bit scary. It can have some anxiety along with it as well.
And so what I found amongst many things that we can do to help kids at this stage is to actually is to secure them in the past before they go forward into the future. It's like saying to them, you know, you come from somewhere, you have a foundation, you can move through that doorway. You can lift off into the future because you have good ground under your feet.
Let me give some practical examples of this. One of the things we can do in securing them in the past is tell them lots of I remember when stories. I remember when you were just two years old and or I remember when you were just learning to walk and you took your first steps and we all hooted and laughed so much and clapped our hands that you sat right on down and wouldn't walk for the next several weeks.
Actually, I'm not making that up. That happened in our family to my oldest daughter. So the I remember when stories of when you were little, they're very heartwarming, but they need not just stay with with the child themselves.
They can be family stories of I remember when I was a child and, you know, and children love to hear stories of when we were little, particularly when we got into trouble or, you know, were a bit naughty. They're the favorite ones, aren't they? But stories and they've heard them before. Of course, most of them they've heard before.
And it's not that we're over disclosing terrible things. It's just lovely, heartwarming family stories. We might even dip back into stories of grandma or grandpa or even further beyond.
And lots of family stories. And you wrap those stories around a child like a big, warm blanket, warming them up before they throw off that blanket and step forward into the into their middle childhood, really, as they're leaving early childhood behind. One of the other things that you can do is gather together lots of photographs and have and I don't mean to clutter all your walls with them, but circulate family photographs of when they were a baby or when you were young or these days with the advent of smartphones, we can take pictures of pictures, can't we? Even if we don't have access to the negatives anymore and go back as many generations as as you actually can and and have these photographs nearby.
They're awfully securing to a child. I remember one of my children had it was unwell, had a high fever. And I noticed around the walls, there were lots of photographs that that were missing.
And I thought, so up I went to to check in on her and there around her was a nest of all these family photographs of grandma and grandpa and great grandma. And she also, by the way, had letters and cards that she'd kept from grandma and grandpa in a little box. And she had them all around her and they were all kind of sticking to her, actually, because she was so sweaty, the poor little love with with her fever.
And she had constructed a nest of photographs all around her while she had this Lyme's disease and this terribly high fever and was feeling so poorly. And what what helped her feel safe? Family photographs, family letters and cards and so on, which kind of leads me to the to the last suggestion, that of scrapbooking. One mom years ago that I mentioned this to, she took it even further.
She got one of those big old scrapbooks, quite large pages, many pages, slightly thicker card. We all know those scrapbooks, right? You can you can buy them. Not terribly expensive.
And she put together with her nine year old started constructing various pages of that was that ticket when we went in here. Here's that photograph. Here's that card from grandma when she was traveling.
Here's that particular photograph. Here's that ribbon from when you were a baby. Do you remember we kept that? And then and she the child was just would would snuggle up beside her and she described it to me.
I thought that's like bringing photographs, stories, momentums, mementos all together in one place. And they would on rainy days have cozy times building this scrapbook. And she said to me, it got to be multiple pages.
And it was just one of the loveliest things she could do. And a lot of the antsiness and freshness and challenging behavior of of her own, of her son, in this case, was I don't I don't think it's I'm remembering that it went away, but it was more malleable. It was easier to bring a child back.
And it always is right when we've got the deeper our our connection, the easier the correction, if if need be. And so the the scrapbooking is something that I've passed on to countless parents over the years. And it is some parents have said to me when they get really grumpy, sometimes we just find them down at the coffee table just looking through their scrapbook or they take it up to their room and they have it as a treasure and we keep adding things into it.
And again, it's like securing in the past. It's saying you come from good people, you come from a loving family, you come from a loving mother as best we can. I know it's not always like that.
Our extended families aren't always full of beautiful, loving times, but we can choose ones that are as best we can. And then do what we can to make these stories, photos, mementos and scrapbooks saying, go forward, off you go into the future. I'm so sad that you're not my little baby anymore, but I'm so elated that you're becoming a big one as well.
And this is a way in which we can launch our children slowly into that that phase of of middle childhood. OK, I sure hope that was helpful. Bye bye for now.
