Welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim John Payne. So glad you could carve out 10-15 minutes to join us again today. We are going to look today at a sort of a vexed problem that comes up for so many of us as parents, and that's when children refuse to come along to a planned family activity.
It's almost like a hostage-taking situation, where they just simply will not come. They won't come along. They won't join in, and they refuse.
And I want to give a really practical and simple way to deal with kids refusing to come to the park, to come to the party, the extended family gathering, or whatever it is. Now to start off with, though, I want to refer us back to one of the... there's a transition tool. There's a number of transition tools, actually, in the podcast episodes as you look back.
One of the ones I particularly want to refer to is called Your World, My World, Our World. Have a look at that. Have a listen to that.
Because in that podcast, what I talk about, and this is in a briefest nutshell, but if you're trying to transition a child, the first thing to do is connect with them, connect before you direct. So connect with them. And just sit beside them for 15, 20, 30 seconds, and just ask them what they're up to, what they're doing.
And be interested, and look, and have them explain to you what it is they're doing. And then, 30 seconds, a minute at the most later, just say, well, you know what? I'm going to go over and get our coats and backpacks organized, because remember we're going down the park today, and I'll get that ready. So why don't you just finish on up here, and I'll go and get some stuff ready.
There's no hurry. And then two, three, maybe five minutes later, you come on back and say, okay, things are ready now. We're headed off.
Now at this point, you can get the, no, I don't want to, or the, no, I don't want to go, you know, with an older kid. No, I'm not going that. And it's like, oh my goodness, you know, your partner's got their coat on, they're waiting in the car.
Your oldest, you know, the child's oldest sibling is also walking out the door, or, and everyone is sort of hoping that this won't happen yet again, all right? And their frustration starts spreading all around. The thing to do here is to have a way of working with this. Okay, you've given a little bit of a transition heads up, but there's still a refusal.
And is to say to a child, a tween, a teen, you know, in our family, you know, sweetheart, we've got, we just, we do stuff together, and I need you to be with us. You need to come along, statement number one. But statement number two, the main one, is be with us.
You know, you know, that's what we do. Be with us. You don't have to do it.
You don't have to join in. But yeah, I know, you don't want to do it. You don't want to go to the party.
It's lame. Okay, I get it. I get it.
But you do have to be with us. But you don't have to join in. That's fine.
Really, we can pick some, we can pack some things up. I've even got some things ready in a backpack, and you can just take your drawing along. Or we can play battleships together.
We can, if it's a little one, you might say, we can take our Tegu blocks along, or some beeswax modeling, or even a book that we can read together. We can do all that. You don't have to join in.
But you do have to be with us. Now, this will become easier and easier as you do it more and more, because a child learns to trust the process of this, that they don't have to join in. Let me explain a little bit more about this process, just so that you can have this in the back of your mind.
After this insistence, know, you are coming along, and we are going to do this together as a family. Other people want to do it. I'm sorry you don't want to, but you don't have to do it.
Sweetheart, you don't have to join in. It's okay. Now, explaining this a little bit more, I wanted to explain it through three concentric circles.
When you arrive at wherever it is the child didn't want to go, allow them to be peripheral. Allow them to kind of exist metaphorically on the edge of town. They don't have to join in.
They don't have to talk to you. They don't have to do anything. They can just sit like grumpy little gnomes if they want to.
No worries. They can be peripheral on the edge of town. No problem.
And let them be. After a little while, then bring them into the neighborhood. So you move them from being peripheral to being proximal.
So the proximal thing is being in the neighborhood. It's a lovely metaphor. It applies to many things, but it does apply to this as well.
So now in the neighborhood, you might get a book out and say, let's just have the next part of the chapter. And you might read in a quiet place. There's a big family party going on.
And maybe you just, you know, in the warmer months, go out and sit on the porch and just do some reading together. Or with a younger one, you might get their blocks out and they can build some stuff. Or with a tweenager, you can play, you know, a paper game like noughts and crosses or battleships.
But now you're moving into play. You're moving into actual relationship. And you see what you're doing? You're moving into relationship and you're moving from solitary to paralleling.
Now, is the 12, 13 year old, the three, four year old, doesn't matter. Are they actually joining in? No, they're not joining in with a bigger group, but they are getting outside themselves a little bit. And they're playing battleships with you on a piece of paper.
If you don't know battleships, look it up. You'll see it. There's probably a YouTube for it.
There's YouTube for everything. Or they're doing something that they like to do and they're doing it with you. So now they're engaging and you're basically replicating an earlier play stage for, let's say, a sullen nine year old.
Nine year olds do a good job at sullenness quite often and refusal. And you're moving them for when they were very little, they first of all played in solitary play when they were quite tiny. And then when they were a little bit older, they started parallel playing and they would be beside another child, not playing with them, but moving the truck backwards and forwards because their friend was moving the truck backwards and forwards and they wouldn't be interacting, but they're paralleling.
It's a very early stage where kids find a way into play. Well, all you're doing is replicating that. It works perfectly well for older kids.
So you parallel, but you're also building an attachment bridge. And I mentioned this in a recent podcast, this whole idea of attachment bridging is that you're now drawing a child out of themselves and into the wider environment. You're moving them into the neighborhood of play because you're playing with them.
The next stage is to look around and just start noticing what the other kids are doing. Let's say it's at the park and they're doing a pickup game of basketball. If they're older kids or if the little ones there, they're swinging on the swings and just notice and just make some comments and essentially have the child follow your eyes.
So you're now leading them from the periphery of play at the edge of it all. You're leading them into the neighborhood of it. And now you're noticing what's going on right in the play itself, in the house, so to speak, you're noticing.
And you can point out some things and you can say, gosh, that kid is really good at layups, isn't he? Look at that. Look at that. Oh, my goodness.
That was a good steal. That's noticing a basketball game. Well, you know what? There's some kids over there that are just sitting or are just practicing their dribbling.
Huh? They're not joining in. They're just practicing. Well, they're shooting hoops on this.
A couple of kids shooting hoops on their own. They're not in the game. And then so what you're doing is you're noticing things that are going on and a child almost involuntarily will follow your eyes.
You're not asking them to get off the seat at all. You're not at all. If you're at a family party, you just might be noticing that some corn has been put on the grill.
Oh, my goodness. That corn smells nice, doesn't it? Is that? Oh, that's Uncle Charlie doing. I know.
He always burns stuff. Yeah. He looks funny in the apron, doesn't he? Yeah.
I think it's too small for him. And you're just noticing what's going on and be happy with that. Now, if a child gets up and takes a few steps out and wants to look at something, let them go, of course.
And you're thinking, yes, great. But if they don't want to, that's fine, too. Just stay where we are.
And what happens in myriad, like many, many situations in all its different kind of iterations is that kids will join in and they're happy joining in. They didn't want to go, didn't want to go. But we know that when they do go, they often have a lovely time, which is what makes this whole thing frustrating, right? They're refusing.
But when they get there, they're fine. So this is a way of not only getting them there, but it's a way of building little bridges to them actually joining in. So, coming full circle now, back just as we close, the whole point is, as you do this more and more about the be with me, it's be with us, love.
It's non-negotiable. You can say that to an older child. For a little one, no.
It's, I understand, love, but you need to be with us. You don't have to join in, but you do have to come along. Now, as you do that more and more and a child experiences that they actually, you're being true to your word, they don't have to join in.
They'll trust you more and more and more. And the resistance you get to, no, I don't want to go. That stuff will become easier and more flexible, more malleable, because they really do know they don't have to join in.
Will they join in? Very, very likely. And then they won't want to leave, right? And that's a story for another time. Okay, I sure hope that was helpful.
Bye-bye for now.
