Simplicity Parenting: Using the Extraordinary Power of Less to Raise Calmer, Happier, and More Secure Kids

by Kim John Payne

The “gift” of a scraped knee, an argument with a friend, five days flat out with the flu—these can strengthen a child’s resilience and their awareness of their own abilities. Such normal stresses are examples of “necessary resistance.” We all, including children, need to meet resistance in life in order to learn how to understand it, work through it, and move on. Such stresses may be worrying but not damaging if we learn we have the skills and the support to deal with them and move beyond them.

The pace of our daily lives is increasingly misaligned with the pace of childhood.

Is there anything that we don’t feel the need to hurry? Anything that we don’t feel the need to enrich, improve upon, advance, or compete over?

worry that we’ll understand the “purpose” of childhood by seeing, increasingly, what people are like when they’ve been rushed through theirs.

Childhood is also an all-important environment, with its own systems, its own natural processes. And society is poking quite a few holes in the protective filter that should surround childhood to buffer it from adult life and concerns.

Parents and I discuss the four levels of simplification: the environment, rhythm, schedules, and filtering out the adult world.

Too much stuff leads to too little time and too little depth in the way kids see and explore their worlds.

Little ones “graze” on our emotions. They feed on the tone we set, the emotional climate we create. They pick up on the ways in which we are nervous and hypervigilant about their safety, and it makes them nervous; so these feelings cycle.

“The central struggle of parenthood is to let our hopes for our children outweigh our fears.”

Because by simplifying our children’s lives we can remove some of the stresses of too-much and too-fast that obstruct their focus and interfere with an emotional baseline of calm and security.

Yet simplification is not just about taking things away. It is about making room, creating space in your life, your intentions, and your heart. With less physical and mental clutter, your attention expands and your awareness deepens.

Too much stuff leads to too many choices.

We are the adults in our children’s lives. We are the grown-ups. And as the parents who love them, we can help our children by limiting their choices. We can expand and protect their childhoods by not overloading them with the pseudochoices and the false power of so much stuff. And as companies spend billions trying to influence our children, we can say no. We can say no to entitlement and overwhelm, by saying yes to simplifying.

As you decrease the quantity of your child’s toys and clutter, you increase their attention and their capacity for deep play.

Meaning hides in repetition: We do this every day or every week because it matters. We are connected by this thing we do together. We matter to one another. In the tapestry of childhood, what stands out is not the splashy, blow-out trip to Disneyland but the common threads that run throughout and repeat: the family dinners, nature walks, reading together at bedtime (with a hot water bottle at our feet on winter evenings), Saturday morning pancakes.

Studies have shown that the more often families eat together, the more likely it is that kids will do well in school, eat fruits and vegetables, and build their vocabularies, and the less likely they will smoke, drink, do drugs, suffer from depression, struggle with asthma, or develop eating disorders.

The family dinner is more than a meal. Coming together, committing to a shared time and experience, exchanging conversation, food, and attention…all of these add up to more than full bellies. The nourishment is exponential.

Sleep is the ultimate rhythm. Everything your child does and who they will be are affected by their sleep or lack of it.

Rest nurtures creativity, which nurtures activity. Activity nurtures rest, which sustains creativity. Each draws from and contributes to the other.

peaceful moments have been eroded as our various forms of communication and interruption have increased.

So much activity can create a reliance on outer stimulation, a culture of compulsion and instant gratification. What also grows in such a culture? Addictive behaviors. You can see the shadow of overscheduling in this definition of addiction given by my colleague Felicitas Vogt: “an increasing and compulsive tendency to avoid pain or boredom and replace inner development with outer stimulation.”

Worry may be an aspect of parenthood, but it shouldn’t define it.

By the time the average person reaches age seventy, he or she will have spent the equivalent of seven to ten years watching television.16

“Viewing entertainment violence can lead to increases in aggressive attitudes, values and behavior, particularly in children. Its effects are measurable and long-lasting.”21

In its July 2016 guideline on media violence, the American Academy of Pediatrics warned that violent media set a poor example for children. Videogames, the academy noted, “should not use human or other living targets or award points for killing, because this teaches children to associate pleasure and success with their ability to cause pain and suffering to others.”23

Young children don’t view violence in the same way as adults do. Until the age of six or seven, children are developmentally and psychologically unable to differentiate between reality and fantasy.26 So when they view brutal acts on television, they see them as “real.” What’s more, by viewing violence—murder, rape, or assaults—from the comfort and safety of their home, snuggled up on the couch with loved ones, while perhaps eating snacks or a meal, children (and adults for that matter) become desensitized to violence, learning to equate it with pleasure.

Many parents “flashbulb” their children with too much of their own adult concerns, their own unprocessed thoughts and feelings. I worry sometimes that we’ve let our guards down as a society, talking to children too openly about too much. When we let children in on too much information—adult verbal and emotional clutter—it rushes them along, pushing them ahead without a foundation.

Too much information doesn’t “prepare” a child for a complicated world; it paralyzes them.

Before you say something, ask yourself these three questions: Is it true? Is it kind? Is it necessary? And I would add: Will it help the child feel secure?

The heart of being a parent—the joy of it—is still unpredictable. Absolutely remarkable and unexpected.

They need our reassurance that most people are good, that even in overwhelming disaster, there are always good people helping others in need. Our loving presence and deep quiet listening may be more helpful than a lot of explanations. Children can, and do, work things out for themselves according to their own abilities, over time, in the warmth and calmness of adult presence.