Simplicity Parenting by Kim John Payne and Lisa M. Ross encourages parents to reduce the sources of stress in their children's lives by focusing on four key areas: creating rhythms, reducing clutter, establishing limits, and connecting deeply. By taking these steps, they can create an environment that allows their children to be present, to be themselves, and to be inspired by life.

I’m sharing a selection of my highlights from the book here both for myself, and in hopes that they help inspire you to read the book as well. I want to be able to refer back to these on a regular basis for review and inspiration. These are only a few snippets of my highlights — there are many more great thoughts and ideas than just these!

Introduction

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. p. X

When "multitasking" is valued as a survival skill, should we be surprised when increasing numbers of our children are being "diagnosed" with "attention difficulties"? p. X

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. p. XI

Without a doubt, as the family's architects we can add a little more space and grace, a a little less speed and clutter to our children's daily lives. p XI

One • Why Simplify?

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 sp

By simplifying, we protect the environment for childhood’s slow, essential unfolding of self. p. 6

Our society — with its pressures of “too much” — is waging an undeclared war on childhood. p. 8

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.

The authors label this compensatory behavior they observed cumulative stress reaction or CSR. They mention that it’s similar to what the American Psychological Association now refers to as complex post-traumatic stress disorder or CPSD.

CSR is characterized not by the severity of a traumatic event, but rather by the consistency or frequency of small stresses. p. 10

The pace of our daily lives is increasingly misaligned with the pace of childhood. p. 10

As our worlds accelerate to mach speeds, we not only pull our children along, we also project some of our anxieties about the speed onto them. 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? p. 11

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 increasingly complex world: well-being and resilience. p. 12

A protected childhood allows for the slow development of identity, well-being, and resiliency. p. 12

As parents, we don’t often get to live the ideals … parenting is about being in the thick of it. p. 15

Like any work of art, families need inspiration, fresh infusions of hope, and imagination. p. 15

As parents become more involved in simplifying, in increasing rhythm and predictability in the home (Chapter Four), they will learn how to build in “pressure valves,” little islands of clam throughout the day. p. 18

The Process: Getting Started

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 doable is the place to begin. p. 18

So often we need to find our way to a goal by identifying and discarding what that vision is not. p. 19

... imagine the sensory overload that can happen for a child when every surface, every drawer and closet is filled with stuff? So many choices and so much stimuli to rob them of time and attention. Too much stuff deprives kids of leisure, and the ability to explore their worlds deeply. p. 22

Children are such tactile beings. p. 22

Too much stuff leads to too little time and too little depth in the way kids see and explore their worlds. p. 22

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. p. 23

The Changes

A simplification regime can create space in a family’s habit life and intentions, a vessel for change to occur. p 24

All children are quirky. p. 24

I’ve seen how children can slide along on the spectrum from quick to disorder when they experience high levels of stress. … q + s = d; or: quirk plus stress equals disorder. p. 24

Their response to stress is to check out; that is their escape route. p. 24

This sliding along the spectrum is really quite normal. Just as stress can push children in one direction, the reverse is also true. When you really simplify a child’s life on a number of levels, back they come. We can see parallels in our own lives. p. 25

Building character and emotional resiliency is a lot like developing a healthy immune system. We know that our children need to be exposed to a variety of bugs and viruses in life. p. 26

By overprotecting them we may make their lives safer (that is, fever free) in the short run, but in the long urn we would be leaving them vulnerable, less able to cope with the world around them. p. 26

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. p. 27

“The central struggle of parenthood is to let our hopes for our children outweigh our fears.” p. 27

We’ve fully embraced the pharmacological approach to behavioral issues in America; … No other country prescribes psychoactive medications to children the way we do; Americans consume 80 percent of the world’s Ritalin. Our reliance on pharmaceuticals is alarming by any standard. p. 28

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. p. 29

These were lifestyle changes made by parents, teachers, and the children themselves: methods available to anyone. The “protocol” was simplification: a building up of their vitality, or etheric forces, and a quieting down of their stimulation. p. 30

… I think of these drugs largely as scaffolding. When a building needs work you erect scaffolding to reach the chimney or roof, to add masonry or flashing, whatever might be necessary. When the work is over, you take the scaffolding away. A lot of this medication for kids has become scaffolding, rusted in place. I think of it not as structural, not a solid addition or even buttressing. I see these drugs, most of the time, as temporary measures. p. 31

… most any parent can relate to the mysterious singular nature of each child the thing we refer to when we say that from birth, from the moment we first met our son or daughter, “they were who they were.” Aristotle used the term telos to describe this, a thing or person’s essence, their intrinsic intent. p. 32

Our children come to us with a deep destiny — here again, some may say spirit— that needs to be heard. It must be honored. p. 33

A little grace is needed, after all, for them to develop into the people they’re meant to be, especially in a world that is constantly bombarding them (and us) with the distractions of so many things, so much information, speed, and urgency. These stresses distract from the focus or “task” of childhood: an emerging, developing sense of self. As parents we also define ourselves by what we bring our attention and presence to. p 33

With simplification we can bring an infusion of inspiration to our daily lives; set a tone that honors our families’ needs before the world’s demands. p. 33

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. p. 34

We can become trapped in our own amygdala hijack, a sort of emergency response to parenting, characterized more by fear than by understanding. p. 34

Why simplify? The primary reason is that it will provide your child with greater ease and well-being. Islands of being, in the mad torrent of constant doing. 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. p. 34

As a parent your attention will also expand with a little less mental clutter in your life. And your awareness of your child will deepen. p. 34

The most elemental and powerful reason to simplify is this: As your awareness of your children widens and deepens, so too will your love. p. 34

I’ve found that the simplest path to real and lasting change is through imagination. “Nothing happens unless first a dream. . . .” When you create a mental image of your hopes, you chart a course. You create a picture that you can then step into. Like a lasso thrown around a star, your imagination navigates the surest path to your goal. p. 34

Two • Soul Fever

We see our children with a depth of vision equal to the sum of our attention, our connection, our love for them, and our fervent desire to understand them. p. 37

Simplification is about stripping away the distractions and clutter that monopolize our attention and threaten our connection. It’s about giving kids the ease to become themselves, and giving us the ease to pay attention. p. 37-38

Let’s look at how, instinctively, we treat an emotional fever in much the same way we do a physical fever: by drawing the child close and suspending their normal priorities. p. 38

Emotional growing pains, or soul fevers, are as natural and inevitable as the common cold, and can be “treated” in remarkably similar ways. p. 39

Adolescence is all about polarities, and swinging between them. p. 41

The developmental purpose of adolescence’s polarities is a zig-zaggedy path toward self-regulation. p. 41

What allows a teenager to move between polarities is the (boring) stability in their lives. p. 42

When we think back to our childhoods (as our children will to theirs), these small acts of noticing can form the emotional foundation of “home” or “family”: the place where we were “read”, understood, held in balance. p. 42

To be continued as I keep reading..