Welcome back to the Simplicity Diaries with me, Kim John Payne. This week I wanted to talk about over-talking. It's a theme that a lot of us are becoming aware of, is filtering out adult conversation from kids' lives.
There's a lot going on right now in the world that we as adults need to, and we are, very concerned about. But filtering this out and filtering out our worries and our concerns with children and just being really careful with what we say is one level of over-talking. And I cover that a lot in the Simplicity Parenting book, but I wanted to focus a little bit more on the over-talking to children when we're going into justifying, when we're over-talking in situations that simply just don't, we don't need to go there.
I saw a cartoon once years ago in the New Yorker magazine where a little boy was being, clearly being a little bit naughty, and his mother had a parenting book under her arm. You could see it was a parenting book. And she said to her little boy, come over here.
Your mother wants to talk to you quite a lot in a weird, calm voice. I cut that cartoon out. It just cracked me up.
I thought, so true. One of these days, I think, honestly, we're going to step out of our front door and the continent will have sunk under the weight of parental words. There's just too many words used for little kids.
Part of the reason I'm concerned about the too many words is that we lose our adult authoritativeness because we over-talk it and we leave a child really not sure what it is they're supposed to be doing, where it is we stand. You can almost see it in them. They're not quite sure.
Now, if they're not quite sure, that offers them an out point and they won't do it. They won't move along with the program for the day because we're over-talking it and our anxiety levels are pushing us to over-talk it. And then our child just thinks, you know what? Like classic Charlie Brown, like wah, wah, wah, wah, wah.
They are not listening, point one. They start to close it down because they just can't process that amount of rapidly spoken words. And point two, as I mentioned, is that they not only close us down, but they just keep doing whatever they want because it didn't land.
There was just too great a volume of verbiage for them to be able to feel that, yeah, my mom, my dad, my guardian really means that. And so I better, yeah, okay, I better do that. I better clean up.
You know, come in for dinner now. I bet whatever it is. But we've got to be careful with over-talking because it undermines our authoritativeness and that then leaves a child feeling unsafe.
Again, I talk about this a lot, don't I? Because they don't know who's in charge. They don't know who is providing leadership. You'll notice this with good leaders, their instructions and directions are very clear.
You know, on the sports field, for example, a captain or a coach of a team is not talking 90 to the dozen. They're not talking and talking. They call a timeout.
It's pressured. And their instructions are often one thing. We're doing this.
They speak about this and they don't use a lot of words. And the clarity, you're really trying to reduce this down to what is essential that I need to communicate in this moment to our team. The same thing, the same exact thing is true in parenting.
What is essential and what is inessential? What am I trying to communicate to my child right now? And I communicate it. And if they need it, then they need for me to go over it again. Then I'll just repeat the essential.
I won't go into this great big thing of why do I have to talk to you five times? And I heard a child once say, well, because they don't have to do it the first time. I thought I looked at the mom who said that and we bless her heart. She started to sort of giggle a little bit because it was so true.
It broke the tension. But it was also a little bit tragic, right? Then if you get pushback, you can just say, uh-uh, no, time for dinner. No, I'm sorry, time.
No, I said it was time. And you're not getting into a bunch of justification. Um, that kind of justification and oversharing leads kids to almost feel like we're their siblings and not their parents.
If you listen to kids playing, they talk a lot to each other backwards and forwards, and there's non sequiturs flying around. And they want to, you know, you almost wonder if they're talking to each other sometimes, but then they'll get into it again. And there's a lot of words figuring out what it is they're going to do, right? That's normal for siblings, for playmates.
But we reduce ourselves to that level. And I don't mean as low or higher. It's just a different level that we shouldn't be on in the first place.
And over-talking leaves our children feeling like they have a choice. They can choose to do it or not. They can choose to comply with it or not.
And that we're their sibling. Now, again, if you watch kids play, as I've done very carefully over a number of years, the kids who are more in charge, the ones who really are setting the course of the play, are not the ones that talk a lot. The ones that talk a lot and negotiate and sort of, they're the ones that are sort of a part of the play, but they're trying to get their vision of what they want the game to be accepted.
Right? By the leader of the game. Now, if we're talking a lot, we place ourselves in that sort of slightly submissive role, where we're trying to talk a lot to convince a child to accept our vision of coming to dinner, of cleaning up a room, of getting in the car. And there is almost an unspoken and unconscious subjugating of ourselves when we over-talk it.
So for all those reasons, I would suggest being like, through these next weeks, thinking, do I over-talk? Do I not? And you might not be. And then the second part of this is, when is it that I over-talk? And a lot of parents have said to me over the years, and I'm not immune to this either, we tend to over-talk when we're a bit anxious, when we're a bit nervous, and we're not inside the instruction that we're about to give. So I hope that was kind of helpful.
It's really just a point of consciousness to pull back from this almost like national obsession that we have going on in many countries around the world of over-talking to kids. Okay, bye-bye for now.
