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December 17, 2018 - July 18, 2019
To look at our society’s assault on childhood another way, let’s take sleep as an analogy.
Does sleep do something, besides mark the time between wakefulness? Does childhood do something, other than mark the time until adulthood?
Scientists are learning the biological “purpose” of sleep by studying what happens when we’re deprived of it. Sleep deprived, people are much less able to retain or use what they learn while awake. They lose resiliency—mental and physical—as their immune system falters. Still we wonder, can we skip it? Can we do without it, or shortchange it in some way, to reclaim the third of our lives that is “lost” to slumber? As a society we seem to be asking the same questions about childhood. What purpose does it serve? Can we speed it up? Can we better prepare our children for adulthood by treating
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I worry that we’ll understand the “purpose” of childhood by seeing, increasingly, what people are like when they’ve been rushed through theirs. And I don’t think that will be a pretty picture. Childhood has its own mysterious processes, its own pace.
When we ask children to “keep up” with a speeded-up world, I believe we are unconsciously doing them harm. We are depriving them of exactly what they need to make their way in an incr...
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Before we focus on each layer of simplification in the chapters ahead, I want to give you an overview of the process. I’ll take you through a consultation, asking you some of the same questions I’ve asked other families to consider. In order to act out of hope rather than fear, out of reverence for childhood rather than fear of our times, simplification begins with dreams. Carl Sandburg once said, “Nothing happens unless first a dream.” This is no exception. Your dreams for your family will be your motivation; they’ll act as your wings throughout the process.
you can see so much, including what a family holds dear, from the pattern of their everyday lives.
Imagine just such an average day for your family, and what it might look like to an observer. What are the difficulties that might arise? What periods of the day are consistently stressful?
couple’s own vision of their family, how they imagined it before they had children. It is important for them to dream their way back, before stepping forward, to reclaim the images and hopes most central and dear to them. These are the images that guide them through the work ahead. And simplification helps enormously in recovering those dreams.
How did you imagine your children? How did you picture yourselves as parents? You no doubt talked about aspects of your own upbringing … those you wanted to emulate, and others that you wanted to avoid at all costs. How did you imagine your home, with children?
As parents we don’t often get to live the ideals. Not a spectator sport, parenting is about being in the thick of it. We may be the architects of our family’s daily lives, but it’s hard to draw blueprints of something that is constantly changing and growing. With kids you don’t have much time to dream, and most parents are surprised by how far they’ve strayed from the dreams they once had for their family.
What do you need to move forward, in a way that reclaims your hopes and dreams for your family? The dreams are still very much alive, that much is clear. But also painfully clear is the distance between those dreams and the present reality.
What imagination can be brought to the life that you make and remake together, as a family? Remember, “Nothing happens unless first a dream.” Can you recapture your dream of a family life that is big enough to accommodate all of its members? Can you realign your reality with the hopes you had for your family?
Parents can sometimes feel overwhelmed by the problems, unable to see a pattern or starting point. Parts of the day may be problematic, such as meals and bedtimes, and we discuss these, looking at them in the context of daily life.
Such explosions are rarely the result of the activity itself; they arise from pressures building up long before.
learn how to build in “pressure valves,” little islands of calm throughout the day.
At this early point, our goal is to take the pulse of the family, to see what is happening. How does this picture differ from our vision of family? What would make it better? This is a process that anyone can do. If you look objectively at the pattern of your days together, what are the flashpoints? The points at which tempers rise, cooperation evaporates, and chaos ensues?
Rather than address the particularly worrisome concerns head-on, it is important first...
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In terms of areas to change I usually see two categories: what is important, and what is doable.
What seems the most important is usually not; what is most doable is the place to begin. If you do enough that is doable, you will get to the important, and your motivation will be fueled by your success.
Simplification signals a change and makes room for a transformation. It is a stripping away that invites clarity.
Reacquainted with their dreams for their families, parents and I talk about how a simplification regime might help them change course, how simplifying might make room for a shift, a realignment of their hopes with their everyday lives.
four levels of simplification: the environment, rhythm, schedules, and filtering out the adult world.
Marie’s parents chose to address Marie’s home environment first, as I’ll recommend you do too.
Her story shows that by starting with the doable, we can pave the way for broader changes.
This sea change was not just the result of “tidying up.” It was a conscious move, both practical and philosophical, toward a more rhythmic, predictable, child-centered home life. By that I do not mean that the home and everything done in it are oriented toward the child, but I absolutely do mean that the home and everything in it are not exclusively oriented toward adults.
Too much stuff deprives kids of leisure, and the ability to explore their worlds deeply.
Very simple principles, gradually incorporated into a home, produce dramatic shifts in a family’s emotional climate, in their connection to one another. In this work, I often think about a stream, dammed by a pile of rocks that has accumulated gradually … so gradually that the rocks have gone unnoticed, but the imbalance is felt. By reducing mental and physical clutter, simplification increases a family’s ability to flow together, to focus and deepen their attention, to realign their lives with their dreams.
The work we were doing was not so much healing work as preparatory work. A simplification regime can create space in a family’s habit life and intentions, a vessel for change to occur.
Simplification protects the environment for childhood’s slow, essential unfolding of self.
The truth is we all have our quirks, our personalities and idiosyncrasies. We tend to be more tolerant of them in adults, perhaps because we think of adults as “fully formed” and children as “under construction” and thus more malleable.
Why simplify? Over the years, as I’ve come to see how a child’s quirks or tendencies can be exacerbated by cumulative stress, I’ve seen how children can slide along on the spectrum from quirk to disorder when they experience high levels of stress. If I had a big chalkboard, I would write it as this formula: q + s = d; or: quirk plus stress equals disorder. This is especially worrisome in a society that is often quick to judge, label, and prescribe. Imagine that wonderfully wistful child who loves to be in nature. He or she has a disposition for dreaminess. Very creative, like miniature
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If you have certain “tendencies” normally, then in stressful situations such as these you “become” those tendencies absolutely.
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.
the expansion and contraction is a normal process and cycle. It is one we all experience.
As parents we must not become “harmony addicted.” It’s tempting to hope that every day might be a sort of “rainbow experience” for our children. Wouldn’t that be nice? If only we could suspend them in a sort of happiness bubble. But they need conflict. As Helen Keller noted, “Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet.” Children need to find ways to cope with difficult situations; they need to learn that they can.
Building character and emotional resiliency is a lot like developing a healthy immune system.
“The central struggle of parenthood is to let our hopes for our children outweigh our fears.”
I actually take issue with this label, because I feel that there is no deficit of attention in children diagnosed with ADD. There is an excess of attention, really. These kids can be very attentive, but they have difficulties prioritizing that attention.
The acronym that I think more appropriately describes the syndrome is API: attention priority issue.
The premise we wanted to convey with this approach was one of quantity, not “quality.”
we wanted parents to work toward an overall simplification, to dramatically reduce the quantity of information their kids were taking in from all sources.
What we found is that 68 percent of the children whose parents and teachers adhered to the protocol went from clinically dysfunctional to clinically functional in four months.
they were still far from the fast track to valedictorian and prom king status, that’s all right. If they were still more on the fringe than in the center, that’s okay, considering how far they had come.
Our study counters the view that the brain’s “hormonal cocktail” is entirely predetermined and fixed. The impressive and clinically significant behavioral improvements we saw suggest that a child is affected by more than just the chemical levels in their brain, and the tendencies those levels influence.
What our study shows is that these chemical landscapes and drivers (hormones and tendencies) can be affected by changes in a child’s environment, and their lives. Behavioral tendencies can be soothed or relaxed by creating calm.
In our study of children with serious symptoms of ADHD we found that when we simplified their lives they returned to a reachable and teachable state. They emerged from “amygdala hijack,”
The results suggest that by paying attention to our children’s environments, we can improve their ability to pay attention themselves.
By recognizing neuroplasticity as a real and powerful force, we can wrest ourselves back from genetic and chemical predeterminism, from the notion that we are nothing more than a fixed pattern of genes and neural chemistry.
Oliver Sacks, the author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, among other terrific books, said in one of his lectures, “With neurology, if you go far enough with it, and you keep going, you end up getting weird. If you go a little further, you end up in the spirit.”
