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You can see what a family holds dear from the pattern of their everyday lives.
This is what they see: With our time and presence we give love.
Children are so clearly happiest when they have the time and space to explore their worlds, at play.
studies show that having lots of choices can erode our motivation and well-being.
Without a doubt, as the family’s architects we can add a little more space and grace, a little less speed and clutter to our children’s daily lives.
our level best to provide our children with every advantage now known or soon to be invented.
opportunities; it is about the long haul. The big picture: a reverence for childhood.
Waldorf schools emphasize the imagination and the development of the whole child—the heart and hands as well as the head.
We are building our daily lives, and our families, on the four pillars of too much: too much stuff, too many choices, too much information, and too much speed.
Adult life was flooding in unchecked.
Stress that is damaging is either too large, or too constant to move beyond.
CSR is characterized not by the severity of a traumatic event, but rather by the consistency or frequency of small stresses.
While we haven’t figured a way around the nine-month human gestation period, once that baby is born, its childhood seems to be “fair game” for acceleration.
Parents and I discuss the four levels of simplification: the environment, rhythm, schedules, and filtering out the adult world.
It was very gratifying to see firsthand how effective simplification could be in restoring a child’s sense of ease.
Simplification prepared the space in a child’s daily life for changes to take place. As one psychiatrist put it, his treatment work would then “stick” in a way that it had not previously.
I’ve seen how children can slide along on the spectrum from quirk to disorder when they experience high levels of stress.
Imagine the child who is, and always has been, a doer. She is the one who is at your right hand as you shop, always eager for a task. Or the boy who will do the vacuuming—doesn’t mind it—and always has some new trick or feat to show you. He or she is active in physical play, and is capable of attracting a whole group of kids—in the neighborhood or on the playground—to whatever game they are playing. With a consistent pattern of stress this child can slide right into hyperactivity.
This happens all the time, this sliding along the behavioral spectrum in response to stress. It’s normal and healthy. By dealing with normal stresses, children (and adults) develop ways to cope. They benefit from coping with difficult situations, as they build a sense of competency and self-trust.
Little ones “graze” on our emotions. They feed on the tone we set, the emotional climate we create.
API: attention priority issue.
In our study, we built up the children’s physical and etheric vitality while quieting down the stimulation they were taking in.
Kids are not monks who can meditate for hours a day, but they do the equivalent when they are involved in play, in deep, uninterrupted play.
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.
With fewer distractions their attention expands, their focus can deepen, and they have more mental and physical space to explore the world in the manner their destiny demands.
We learn that comfort is a large part of healing, an essential ingredient in any recipe for “getting better.”
“soul fevers.” Something is not right; they’re upset, overwhelmed, at odds with the world. And most of all, at odds with their truest selves.
Simplification gives children the ease they need to realign with their true selves, their real age, and with their own world rather than the stress and pressures of the adult world.
An extroverted child usually manifests their unease more directly, with anger or blaming.
The younger the child, the more obvious they make their unhappy state. They may become hypersensitive, aware of itchy labels, twisted tights, noises that they wouldn’t otherwise even notice. Little things bother them. Tantrums become deeper, more intractable. Sleep patterns change. You can often see little changes in their posture: shoulders raised, fists clenched. Most of all, they are much more easily “set off” than usual; their emotional switch has a hair-trigger sensitivity.
Yet when a child’s emotional distress is routinely ignored, they will usually, consciously or unconsciously, find other ways to solicit attention.
“When your child seems to deserve affection least, that’s when they need it most.”
But it’s quite another thing to maintain a loving presence with a child who is exploring their inner shadow as they push every one of your buttons as though you were the elevator panel in a skyscraper.
Take at least a few minutes a day (longer or more often is better, but everyone can spare three minutes) to picture your child’s absolute golden self, their “good side.” This will give you the balance you need to look beyond the worst of a soul fever.
Take care of yourself while caring for your out-of-sorts child.
The roots of hopelessness and helplessness need hardened soil; you maintain fertile emotional ground around your child with the compassion of your noticing and caring.
requires, as it builds, commitment.
This profusion of products and playthings is not just a symptom of excess, it can also be a cause of fragmentation and overload.
how too much stuff leads to a sense of entitlement. Or how too much stuff relates to too many choices, which can relate to a childhood raced through at far “too fast” a pace.
Children need time to become themselves—through play and social interaction. If you overwhelm a child with stuff—with choices and pseudochoices—before they are ready, they will only know one emotional gesture: “More!”
What comes through to our children, loud and clear, is “Happiness can be bought!” and “You are the center of the universe!”
Isn’t it a joy to watch a child with a new plaything? It really is a pleasure. As parents, we delight in their ability to focus on something so exclusively, to give themselves over to it in the “flow” of play. We can’t get enough of it. However, that natural ability can be derailed by having too many things to choose from, too much “stuff.” Nothing in the middle of a heap can be truly valued. The attention that a child could and would devote to a toy is shortened, and eclipsed by having too many. Instead of expanding their attention, we keep it shallow and unexercised by our compulsive desire
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but essentially, boredom is the great instigator and motivator of creativity. The frustration of having “nothing to do” is usually the start of something wonderful. We rob children of opportunities to test their own creative mettle when we step into every breach and answer every sigh with another toy or offer of entertainment.
There is freedom with less: freedom to attend, engage, and absorb.
Taken together, though, a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle next to Darth Vader next to Hannah Montana next to Dora the Explorer, all beg the question: Whose imagination is being celebrated: Hollywood’s or the child’s?
Kids don’t need many toys to play, or any particular one. What they need most of all is unstructured time.
Executive function includes the ability to self-regulate, to amend one’s behavior, emotions, and impulses appropriately to the environment and situation.12
Excellent toys for all of this “primal” exploration are buckets, nets, shovels and kites, scoops, bubbles, baskets, and containers for pouring and collecting.
Parents who talk, play, cuddle, and engage their babies, often and with pleasure, build a foundation of feelings that will prepare those small beings for widening circles of socialization, as toddlers and beyond.
Toddlers want to play—even if they’re playing alone—where they can see and be near others.
