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

by Kim John Payne

As parents, we’re the architects of our family’s daily lives. We build a structure for those we love by what we choose to do together, and how we do it. We determine the rhythms of our days; set a pace.

You can see what a family holds dear from the pattern of their everyday lives.

In their development, we can see the extent to which our children feel protected. Surrounded by those they love, they make extraordinary leaps, fantastic moments of revelation and mastery. At our urging or prodding? Never.

In flashes they show us who they are … revealing their golden, essential selves. And as parents we live for such moments. But we can’t schedule them. We can’t ask for, or hurry them. We want our family to be a container of security and peace, where we can be our true selves.

Children are so clearly happiest when they have the time and space to explore their worlds, at play. We may be bouncing between the future and the past, yet our children—the little Zen masters—long to stay suspended, fully engaged, in the moment.

The rest and rejuvenation we want from our homes is getting harder to find. Our work lives have moved in, taking residency in our computers, finding us wherever a phone or pager signal can reach. Children are overbooked as well.

In every aspect of our lives, no matter how trivial, we are confronted with a dizzying array of things (stuff) and choices.

decision fatigue

Too much stuff and too many choices.

If we’re overwhelmed as adults, imagine how our children feel!

too many choices can be overwhelming. Another form of stress. Not only can it eat away at our time, studies show that having lots of choices can erode our motivation and well-being.

Also finding its way into our homes, lives, and our children’s awareness is an avalanche of information, unfiltered and often unbidden.

Our responsibility as gatekeepers is becoming exponentially more difficult even as it’s becoming more critical.

Are we building our families on the four pillars of “too much”: too much stuff, too many choices, too much information, and too fast? I believe that we are. But I also believe that we don’t mean to be.

This book is about realigning our daily lives with the pace and promise of childhood.

Its goal is to help you strip away many of the unnecessary, distracting, and overwhelming elements that are scattering our children’s attention and burdening their spirits.

This book should give you many ideas on how to reclaim such intervals, how to establish for your children islands of “being” in the torrent of constant doing.

The steps I outline in this book should be considered as a menu, not a checklist, from which you can choose what is workable and sustainable for your own family.

There is no “right” order in which to work through the different levels, and no right or wrong time to begin.

The four layers of simplification will serve as a road map as you navigate your own way; each layer will be addressed...

In Chapter One we’ll look at the reasons why simplifying is so cr...

Chapter Two will help you recognize and address the “overload” in your children

Chapter Three begins at the doorway to your child’s bedroom, as we begin to reduce the clutter of too many toys, books, and choices.

Chapter Five we’ll see how to balance particularly active days with calmer ones, challenging the notion that “free time” means “free to be filled” with lessons, practices, playdates, and appointments.

In Chapter Six we’ll consider ways to filter out adult information and concerns from our homes, and our children’s awareness.

We’ll consider ways to simplify our parental involvement and “back out” of hyperparenting, by building a sense of security for our children that they internalize and carry with them as they grow.

We’ll learn new ways to simplify our involvement, increase our trust, and allow connection rather than anxiety to characterize the relationship we build with our children.

It is never “too late” to bring inspiration and attention to the ...

simplification is often about “doing” less, and trusting more. Trusting that—if they have the time and security—children will explore their worlds in the way, and at the pace, that works best for them.

No “expert” is required. In reading the stories I share along the way, you’ll have moments of recognition and inspiration. My hope is that you will come back to this book and continue to draw ideas and encouragement from it as your children grow.

you’ll find it very gratifying to feel your inner authenticity develop as you bring more awareness and attention to your relationship with your children. And with this process comes more opportunities to see deeply into who your children are becoming.

I was most impressed, however, by the commitment they made to change some very ingrained habits. Quite bravely, I thought, they aimed to keep their discussion of politics, their jobs, and their concerns to a time after James went to bed. This was hard to do at first, and they had to remind each other frequently to refrain from talking about these things while James was still awake. But the change became second nature. The quality of their nightly talks intensified, and both parents came to really appreciate this time together because it was exclusively theirs.

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.

since the pressures of “too much” are so universal, we are “adjusting” at a commensurately fast pace. The weirdness of “too much” begins to seem normal. If the water we are swimming in continues to heat up, and we simply adjust as it heats, how will we know to hop out before we boil?

Inner alarms are sounded when we confront the huge disconnect between how we believe childhood should be, and how it has become.

What finally dawned on me was that the treatment plans I was developing for this group of children were identical to those that I had helped develop in Asia. When I looked at my work objectively, I could see no difference between my methods and goals with these children and those I had while treating the children in Jakarta. What I was at last able to grasp was pretty remarkable. I doubted it for as long as I could, until I was certain: These children, these very typical children from an affluent country of the Western world, were showing the signs and symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

After so many instances of clinical déjà vu, I couldn’t ignore my instincts. Certain of the symptoms and behaviors, I was becoming more and more convinced of the cause. And as I looked more closely at their lives, I realized that for both groups the sanctity of childhood had been breached. Adult life was flooding in unchecked.

Privy to their parents’ fears, drives, ambitions, and the very fast pace of their lives, the children were busy trying to construct their own boundaries, their own level of safety in behaviors that weren’t ultimately helpful. These children were suffering from a different kind of war: the undeclared war on childhood.

If you looked at the lives of these kids in England, searching for a signature traumatic event, you wouldn’t find it. You might expect to see early childhood losses that would cause them to react with such nervousness and distrust, such lack of resiliency and hypervigilance. What I came to realize, however, was that there were enough of the little stresses, a consistent baseline of stress and insecurity to add up. These little stresses accrue to the point that it makes psychological “sense” for kids to acquire and adopt compensatory behaviors.

cumulative stress reaction

The psychological community is also beginning to recognize that the attributes and behaviors I was seeing—hypervigilance, nervousness, anxiousness, a lack of resiliency, a lack of impulse control, a lack of empathy, and a lack of perspective taking—all worsen when a child accumulates enough little pieces of stress, with enough frequency. Such a consistent pattern of stress can accumulate into a PTSD-type scenario, or CSR.

CSR describes a reaction to a pattern of constant small stresses, a sort of consistent threshold of stress that may build, but rarely dissipates. Please understand that I am not referring here to the level of stress that is a fact of life. I am not suggesting that stress should not exist for children; it does, and it must. Children experience frustrated desires, illnesses, sorrows, and losses. Their lives are not stress free, and childhood is not a series of “rainbow moments,” each lovelier than the next.

Ralph Waldo Emerson described: “A hero is no braver than an ordinary man, but he is braver five minutes longer.”)

The level of stress described by the term CSR, in its frequency, is very different from the stresses that occur quite regularly and normally in a child’s everyday life. In day-to-day life a child’s moods and well-being are like a seesaw; stress acts like a weight on one end, but once the stress is gone the overall balance returns. 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. Stress that is damaging is either too large, or too constant to move beyond. If our abilities (or a child’s abilities) can’t match it, then he or she can’t understand it, or work through it, and they become stuck in a reoccurring cycle of stress reactions.

CSR is characterized not by the severity of a traumatic event, but rather by the consistency or ...

What I came to understand was that little stresses, collectively, drag on a child’s ability to be resilient: mentally, emotionally, and physically. They interfere with concentration, with an emotional baseline of calm, with a sense of security that allows for novelty and change. They interfere with focus, not just for the item or task at hand. These st...

What has also become increasingly clear to me is that so much of this stress is what we now call daily life. It is the life that surrounds our children, a daily life that is unfortunately not that distinct from those we lead as adults. A daily life submerged in the same media-rich, mult...

I don’t believe the attack is a result of conscious effort.

As a society, however, we’ve signed on wholeheartedly to the notion that more, bigger, newer, and faster all mean better. We’ve done so as a sort of survival mechanism. It is a very basic, primitive drive (albeit with its own particularly manic, modern, Western spin). At its most basic level it is understandable, though it no longer serves its original purpose, and we’ve taken it to the point where it actually threatens, rather than ensures, our survival.

We cram more and more into our homes (even as we’re building them bigger) and our lives (even while suffering from busyness and lack of sleep) and our awareness (twenty-four-hour CNN, blogs, BlackBerries, constant online news updates).

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?