Simplicity Parenting

by Kim John Payne, M.Ed
and Lisa M. Ross

I heard about this book from a blog I follow fairly religiously called The Lazy Organizer. The book intrigued me, I decided to check it out, and now you get to read about it!

I'll just go through the notes I took and maybe...maybe not...add my own thoughts:

The main focus of the book is:
xi: "Are we building our families on the four pillars of "too much": too much stuff, too many choices, too much information, and too fast?"

6: "By simplifying, we protect the environment for childhood's slow, essential unfolding of self."

7-8: Payne worked in schools diagnosing and counseling kids with "D" disorders such as ADD, ADHD, OCD, ODD. He saw similarities between kids he worked with in a Cambodian refugee camps and kids in middle-class modern families - they were both showing signs and symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

8: "Our society - with it's pressures of "too much" - is waging an undeclared war on childhood."

9: simplification signals a change, a realignment of our hopes and our everyday lives

26: "stress can push children along the behavioral spectrum. When you simplify a child's life on a number of levels, back they come."
This, I thought, is really the crux. Payne does talk about medications. He takes a pretty middle of the road stance. He considers medications, for the majority of children, to be good if used ONLY as a scaffolding to hold the child together while their underlying issues are addressed. He doesn't think that most children need to be medicated indefinitely. I know a lot of people have solved their children's issues with nutrition changes. I wonder if part of the reason that nutrition changes work is because it slows the family down and causes them to reassess their entire lives. Either way, I think that he's right that children today are dealing with so much more stress than children used to deal with, and it is definitely worth looking into the relationship between their lives and their behavior.

Areas to simplify
ENVIRONMENT:
too many toys, books, games, smells, clothes, etc. Too much stuff leads to too many choices. AS you decrease the quantity of your child's toys and clutter, you increase their attention and their capacity for deep play.
Regarding books: we want to foster a deep, not disposable, relationship with reading.
I've been working really hard on clearing out clutter in our home and really simplifying and purging our belongings. It's been a months-long process. I have found, as a result of fewer toys and books, that we are just happier. There is less mess to clean up each day. My kids have never struggled with imaginative play, and with fewer toys they are just as creative as before - if not more so. Homeschoolers tend to be collectors. I have found myself giving into the pack-rattish feeling far too often. You wouldn't believe how much school stuff I threw out. Stuff I collected 7 years ago when we first started on this educational path that we NEVER used. I even threw out stuff that we do occasionally use because I realized that we only use it because it's there, not because it's really that awesome. When I work with my younger children, we focus on great books and use paper and pencil for everything else.
I love his opinion on books. Libraries are fabulous. I convinced Josh to purge his books (as I was doing the same with everyone else's). I didn't think he would. But we decided to have only the best books in our house. The books that if my kid reads the same five books over and over I won't consider it a bad thing. A lot of people take the stance that if a kid is reading - anything - that's a good thing. I disagree. If my kid is going to read, I want it to be worth their while. We don't say that if a kid is eating - anything - then it's a good thing. Books are brainfood and should be treated about the same, in my opinion.

RHYTHM:
95: Familylife today often consists of whatever is left over, in terms of our time and energy, when the "work" of the day is done. Children depend on the rhythmic structure of the day.

98: Meaning hides in repetition: we do this every day or every week because it matters
LOVE THIS!

109: Relationships are often built in the intervals, the spaces between activities, when nothing much is going on.

SCHEDULES:
He uses a lot of statistics about the ways childhood has changed from 1981 to 2006. It's fascinating...and a little scary.
He compares enrichment activities to fertilizer. You can have too much of a good thing. Also, fields (and children) need that rest time. The importance of boredom, of Sabbath Moments (quiet days).
Talks about TV and computers...nothing new to me here.

185: Say less. He uses an example from Pa Ingalls - why did Laura and Mary always listen (and obey) Pa? Because he didn't say much. When he spoke, it was worth listening to. Payne points out that you don't have to make every moment a teaching moment. I like this. Payne uses an example of the various kids of talking parents do, such as the sportscaster (running commentary on everything the kid is doing/wearing), the number of questions and choices we give kids, and the hard time we have saying no. I have caught myself doing all of these things because it seemed like something that good parents do. No more!

***************************

My feeling as I read through this book was that there aren't a lot of major changes I want to make in my family's life. We lead a much more unscheduled life than a lot of families do. Some people think we're weird to not have TV in our living room (we are DVD-only, and that is hidden in our bedroom for special occasions) or to not be putting our kids in every sport that comes around. But I like having time to bake bread and watch my kids climb the trees in our backyard. What I did receive from this book was a stronger motivation to finesse our best things. Build some family traditions, touchstones, memories - the sorts of things that I dreamt about before I had children. Take my dreams and make our reality more like them. Obviously that dream of perfect children might have to remain a dream, but there were other more reachable dreams.

In my latest quest of simplifying our lives, it's been amazing to see all the time that has freed up. I used to think that there just wasn't enough time in the day. Now I'm looking for activities to FILL time - or filling time with things that I always wanted to do but never got around to (can anyone say visiting teaching?). My house is cleaner more often, my meals are cooked on time, my kids are happy, my books are getting read. Life is just better, simpler!

DISCLAIMER - having 12 and 10 year old daughters is hugely beneficial to this lifestyle. I highly recommend that you have them before you have your other children. :-) I'd definitely want (NEED) an electronic babysitter more often without them.

From Julia

YES!  I saw this book title on your GoodReads page, Kami, and instantly wanted to read it.  I also had to return the Federalist yesterday and was debating about checking it out again or not.  Probably a not at this point.  But I still want to share some of my thoughts about what I did get to read.  Someday . . .

Response to Kami and Kelly

Kelly, what are "D" disorders?

Kami, I just reserved the book at the library. I think it will help me with my "aggressive" son. Sooooooooooooooooooooo aggressive. Love my boys' boy. Don't love his temper tantrums and holes in the wall.

If anyone else wants to join us, I'm skipping Federalist Papers to discuss this book before resuming our outlined plan. Since nobody wanted to discuss dog training books. :( Kidding. If anyone has anything to say about Federalist Papers as they continue reading, by all means share.

Kelly, when you get to the end of your simplicity parenting, let us know more about it. It sounds interesting. I might just check it out.

Kami, that was fascinating stuff. As I read your first few paragraphs, I couldn't help thinking that this has definitely got to be part of Satan's plan - to blur the line between the sexes. It totally goes against the Proclamation. I've been doing a lot of thinking about the important differences between men and women in regards to marriage. This is a similar topic to my own thoughts. I'm glad you shared. I'll have to see if I can get the book at my library.


On another line, I've been reading pretty interesting book called "Simplicity Parenting". I haven't gotten all the way through it, but I think it would be a beneficial read to anyone who has a child with "D" disorders - and also to anyone with children, really, who wants to keep from overwhelming their kid with the stresses of the modern world.

Why Gender Matters

I recently made a trip to the library for books about child development to give to my husband (including but not limited to the information that you don't feed a one month old baby rice. Errr...) And I ran across "Why Gender Matters" by Leonard Sax and it looked so interesting that I checked it out and stayed up all night reading it even though it wasn't really applicable to what I actually had planned. I tend to dogear books and I started doing that with the intention of sharing the info here. By the end I realized I had pretty much dogeared every single page. So, really, you just need to go check out the book and read it. It really was incredibly fascinating.

Basically the premise of the book is that since the 1960's, popular and scientific parenting theories have prescribed a "gender neutral" child rearing, (give girls trucks, give boys dolls--that sort of a thing) and that a lot of boy/girl differences are created by society. The author refutes that, backs up his assertions with research, and basically says we're destroying society by proporting such theories.

Here's an example of what our society has accepted (at least in pc terms.) "Nature really offers us more than two sexes...Our current notions of masculinity and femininity are cultural conceits. The decision to label a child as a girl or a boy is a social decision. We should not label any child as being either a girl or a boy, there is no either/or. Rather, there are shades of differences." This from a tenured professor from Brown Univ. who's book received mention in the New York Times, Washington Post, and praise from the New England Journal of Medicine for her "careful and insightful approach to gender." I'm really just astounded at that. Really.

The author then cited various research reports to describe just how different biologically males and females truly are. Here's my summary:

1. The brain actually could be considered a sex organ, like ovaries or testicles, because in 2004 it was clearly established that male and female brain tissue is "intrinsically different." Not only the hormones in it, not only the way we use it, but the actual tissue itself.
2. Girl babies' brains' are 80% more responsive to acoustics than boys and the difference only gets bigger as they get older. So basically, those boys that say they didn't hear their soft-spoken female teacher, probably really didn't hear her.
3. Male and female eyes have different percentage of M and P cells; M cells (which males have in larger abundance) track movement and spatial location, while P cells (which females retinas are mostly composed of) track what things are, like color and texture. Not only that, but the actual information from the eye is sent to different parts of the brain depending on gender through entirely different pathways. So translate this to a school setting: Jill draws people, pets, flowers and trees with lots of warm colors-usually ten or more-(what her eyes are more capable at focusing on), while Matthew draws frantic scribbles of a rocket hitting the earth all in one black crayon (black, blue, grey, silver are what M cells are most capable of seeing.) In summary, boys draw verbs, girls draw nouns, and a lot of that is what is visually wired in them.
4. Males and females use different areas of their brain when navigating resulting in girls using landmarks and males using absolute direction like north or south.
5. Already at nine months of age baby boys prefer trucks and baby girls will select dolls. He explains the study that was trying to see if that was really caused by "social constructs," and discovered that most toddlers up till 18 months generally have no clue what gender they are, so it really can't be social pressure. Boys prefer trucks more strongly than girls prefer dolls by the way. And in monkeys the same behavior can be observed.
6. Males and females process their feelings in different locations of their brains. In girls, by teenage years it's in their cerebral cortex right along with their language skills. In boys it stays in their amygdala which has almost no connections to their language center. Translate that to a classroom: Asking a boy how he thinks this character felt in a book is going to get you nowhere.
7. Male and female brains are organized different. Women have higher blood flow per gram of tissue than males. Women have larger brain cells in certain areas with more inputs than than corresponding male brains. Women tend to use mostly the more advanced areas of the brain such as the cerebral cortex, while men doing the same tasks use more primitive areas such as the globus pallidus, the amygdala and the hippocampus. Studies show that men with higher IQ really do have larger brains, but in women there's no difference in size.
8. 8 yr. old girls have more in common with 25 yr. old women than they do with 8 yr. old boys. The reverse is true as well.
9. Boys and male monkeys take far more risks than girls and female monkeys. This is universally true. Girls think extra risks are stupid, for boys it increases their social standing, and plus they like the rush. Girl adolescent monkeys babysit (seriously)--boy adolescent monkeys get squashed on highways taking stupid risks.
10. Males (human and primates) are far more aggressive than females. Boys who fight actually end up better friends afterward. Girls who fight don't speak to each other for a year. Boys preferring violent stories is not an indicator of an underlying psychiatric problem, for girls who prefer violent stories it is. Rough and tumble play is crucial for boys to learn to control their aggression and the irony is that men who didn't experience rough play as children are more likely to commit violent crimes as an adult. He suggests if you have an overly aggressive son you should sign them up for contact sports so they have a supervised release.
11. Men and women respond differently to pain. Women are more sensitive in general. And then when males are under stress it tends to dull the pain, in women under stress it increases it. Also, a pain killer produced by a pregnancy hormone is 4x's more effective in women than men.
12. Males respond to stress and confrontation with the sympathetic nervous system (flight or fight adrenaline rush). Women respond with the parasympathetic nervous system (sick to their stomach, dizzy, have to go to the bathroom, etc.)
13. Girl friendships and boy friendships are completely different, as is bullying.
14. Girls and boys brains mature at different rates, different times, and also in different sequences. Also sex differences are larger in children than in adults (because by then the brain is fully matured.)
15. Girls read fiction, generally about experiences. Boys read nonfiction, generally about struggles with male protagonists. Translate to school setting: 95% of elementary teachers are female, who often pick books which appeal to them, hence boys get message that they don't like to read. He suggests reading the newspaper with boys, or Treasure Island. Not Flowers for Algernon or Of Mice and Men.
16. Boys consistently overrate their abilities, girls consistently underrate their abilities.
17. Dating no longer exists as a practice to find a long-term life partner. Most dating now is based entirely on the hierarchy of their peer group and nothing to do with individual characteristics.
18. Girls generally engage in risky behaviors because of low self esteem. Boys engage in risky behaviors because they are boys and like to take risks.
19. According to Dr. Sax, parents have relinquished control to their children, which supposedly helps them become more responsible. He believes it results in: more fat kids, more teenage sex, and more teenage criminals. And that the mantra has become, "spare the rod, sedate the child."
20. He believes there should be a 7:1 ratio when dealing with your kids, 7 parts fun time, 1 part discipline. And eat dinner together.

And if you want more details and strategies for discipline (positive and negative), you'll have to check out the book.

To sum up he compares males and females to spoons and knifes. You can't argue which is better, only which is better for what. Spoons for broth, knifes for chicken. The difference between what girls and boys can do is small, but the difference in how they do it can be large. But both are equally capable of getting the same nutrients--so say if your child has a spoon you give them beef stew but if your child has a knife you give them meat loaf.

Federalist Papers

I've read some of it, but it hasn't completely captured my interest. For me it's more of a long-term project to read in bits and pieces. And by long-term I mean more than a month. ;-) It might be better to read in conjuction with the anti-federalist papers (over time) because they were debating/responding to each other. At least, that's what I've heard.

Federalist

I'm reading it!  I'm almost halfway through.  But, it's a book I think you can read and overlap with another book.  So if we start reading Robinson Crusoe, I'll still join along.  I have lots to comment on with the Federalist.  I'm not liking the format of the Essential Federalist (the copy I have) because it's just a bunch of quotes all pasted together, so complete thoughts don't seem to always be formed.  Still, it's been good for me to branch out. 

I guess you can say dog training is similar to country shaping?!?! 

Federalist Papers

I've read about twenty dog training books this month. Does that count?

Welcome back!

And congratulations! As far as I know we're still reading The Federalist Papers. At least I finally finished the introduction. Anybody read further?? Anyone? I just ask because if no one is reading it, then maybe we should move on. However, if people are still reading it, I'll continue too.

I'm Back

Hello all! Well, I am finally back into the swing of life... I think. My daughter is two months old now and I am just now begining to feel like I can accomplish stuff on my to do list. Anyway, I am excited to start reading again.
Which book is for June? Are we still reading the federalist papers or was that may?