“Simplicity Parenting takes the strange and unusually wise stance that occasionally less may be more. Less as in less frenetic activity, less racing around, less clutter. Payne provides practical systems for turning down the volume and creating a pace that fosters calmness, mindfulness, reflection, and individuality in children. Simplicity Parenting ought to be on each parent’s (indeed, each person’s) reading list.”—Kathleen A. Brehony, Ph.D., author of Awakening at Midlife

“Brilliant, wise, informative, innovative, entertaining, and urgently needed, this timely book is a godsend for all who love children, and for children themselves. It provides a accomplishable plan for providing the kind of childhood kids desperately need today!” —Edward Hallowell, M.D., author of The Childhood Roots of Adult Happiness

“Kim John Payne helps parents better comprehend one of the most challenging issues of our time–the hurried, materialistic, competitive, highly pressured nature of today’s childhood. After reading Simplicity Parenting, parents’ new mantra will be ‘less builds security, sanity, and connection.’ And they will have the tools they need for implementing this mantra in their families.”—Diane E. Levin, Ph.D., co-author of So Sexy So Soon

From the Hardcover edition.

About the AuthorA consultant and trainer to more than sixty U.S. independent and public schools, Kim John Payne, M.Ed., has been a school counselor for eighteen years and a private family counselor-therapist for fifteen. Payne has worked extensive with the North American and U.K. Waldorf movements. He is presently project conductor of the Waldorf Collaborative Counseling Program at Antioch University New England, the conductor of a big exploration program on a drug-free approach to attention priority issues disorders, and a Partner of the Alliance for Childhood in Washington, D.C. He lives with his wife and two children in Harlemville, New York.

Lisa M. Ross has been involved with books for more than twenty years, as an editor and literary agent, and now altogether as a writer. She lives with her husband and two children in Stuyvesant, New York.

From the Hardcover edition.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.Chapter One

Why Simplify?

We are facing an enormous problem in our lives today. It’s so big we may hardly see it, and it’s right in front of our face, all day, each day. We’re all living too huge lives, crammed from top to toe with activities, urgencies, and obligations that seem absolute. There’s no time to take a breath, no time to look for the source of the problem.”

—Sarah Susanka, The Not So Big Life

James was when it comes to eight years old, and entering third grade, when I met his parents. Lovely and very bright people, James’s mother was a professor and his father was involved in city government. They were worried in regards to their son having trouble sleeping at night, and his complaints of stomachaches. An eight-year-old boy is somewhat well designed to be a picky eater, but James’s pickiness was getting extreme. His stomachaches came and went, but they didn’t seem feed related.

Both parents spoke proudly of how confidently James could speak with adults, but acknowledged that he had trouble connecting with his peers. He warded off things that he felt might be dangerous, and had only very not so long ago learned to ride a bike. “And don’t forget the driving thing,” his mother mentioned. James’s father explained that whenever they drove someplace, James would be the self-appointed policeman in the backseat, letting them recognise when they were even one or two miles above the speed limit, scanning the road in front for worries of any kind. The term “backseat driver” didn’t come close to describing his behavior; you may well imagine how relaxing these road trips were.

As I got to recognise the family, I noticed how much their every day lives were colored by world issues. Both parents were avid news followers. The television was oftentimes on and tuned to CNN, whether they were directly focalized on it or not. Politically and intellectually oriented, they would talk about issues at outstanding length, particularly environmental concerns. From an early age, James had been listening to these conversations. His parents were proud of his knowledge. They felt that they were raising a little activist, a “citizen of the world,” who would grow up informed and concerned.

James’s understanding of international warming seemed to rival Al Gore’s. That much was apparent. James was also, clearly, getting a very anxious little fellow. His parents and I worked together on a simplification regime. We made numerous changes in the home surroundings and primarily increased the sense of rhythm and predictability in their every day life patterns. But our necessary focus was on cutting back James’s involvement in his parents’ intellectual lives, and his access to information.

How much selective information was pouring into the house and into James’s awareness? Instead of three computers in the house, his parents decisive to keep one, in the den off the master bedroom. After much discussion, they actually got rid of both televisions from the home. They felt that this might be harder on them than it would be on James, and they wanted to test their theory. If there were to be sacrifices, they wanted to bear their percentage of them. They also realized that the TVs had become mainly origins of background noise in their home. Would they be missed or not? Game Boys and Xboxes were likewise removed, minimizing the number of screens all around the house.

I was most impressed, however, by the commitment they made to modify a heap of very deeply rooted habits. Quite bravely, I thought, they aimed to keep their discussion of politics, their jobs, and their worries to a time after James went to bed. This was hard to do at first, and they had to remind each other oftentimes to refrain from talking in regards to 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 actually be grateful for this time together because it was exclusively theirs.

James’s parents noticed changes in him within the basi couple of weeks. His level of anxiety went down, and his sleep improved. He started coming up with ideas for projects, and things to do that wouldn’t have mesmerized him previously. It was spring, and the weather was outstanding. Was that it? his parents wondered. At original they weren’t sure, but the trend continued. He was unquestionably mucking with regards to more, getting involved in building things, catching lizards, digging holes. Within when it comes to three or four weeks’ time, James’s teacher likewise reported changes in him. As his play life expanded, his pickiness with regards to feed waned. He started interacting with galore of the kids in the neighborhood, particularly one with whom a friendship blossomed. I’ve stayed in contact with this family, and the friend James made when he was going on nine has remained a lifelong buddy. The boys are in their early twenties now, still close and very supportive of each other.

Was all of this directly attributable to the changes James’s family made? Was it the lack of TV? Less talk of global warming? Can we point to any one thing that made the real difference? My answer to that would be no, and yes. I don’t think there was any one thing, any magic bullet that obliterated James’s nervousness and controlling behaviors. But the steps taken to protect James’s childhood unquestionably had an effect on him and his parents, an effect more outstanding than the sum of their parts. James’s family environs was altered; both the landscape and the aroused climate of their each day life together changed. His parents brought a new knowingness to their parenting, and that continued to serve them. It became the new measure of what did or didn’t make sense in their lives. They no longer felt that James had to recognise everything they knew, or care when it comes to everything that concerned them. In acknowledging and protecting that difference, they gave James the freedom to be more deeply and happily his own age.

When you simplify a child’s “world,” you prepare the way for positive change and growth. This preparatory work is specially necessary now because our world is characterized by too much stuff. We are building our each and everyday lives, and our families, on the four pillars of too much: too much stuff, too a lot of choices, too much information, and too much speed. With this level of busyness, distractions, time pressure, and clutter (mental and physical), children are robbed of the time and ease they need to explore their worlds and their emergent selves. And 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 proceeds to heat up, and we merely adjust as it heats, how will we know to hop out before we boil?

I sincerely believe that our intuition to protect our children will be what motivates us to change. Our impetus out of the proverbial pot will be our desire to protect their childhoods. Even as our own inner voices are silenced by the urgencies and obligations of so much stuff, our instincts as parents still give us pause. We stop short— on occasion or often, depending on how quickened up our lives have become— and wonder how this pace is affecting them. Inner alarms are sounded when we confront the big disconnect amid how we believe childhood ought to be, and how it has become.

Such a moment happened to Canadian journalist Carl Honoré, and was the inspiration for his 2006 book In Praise of Slowness. An admitted “speedaholic” himself, Honoré got the idea for his book in just such a moment of outstanding parental alarm. In an airport bookstore while traveling, Honoré saw a series of books called One Minute Bedtime Stories. His basi instinctive was to buy the whole series and have it shipped, immediately, to his house. In that momentary flash he was remembering the a good deal of times when he had been reading to his two-year- old son (“Read it again, Daddy!”) while thinking regarding unanswered emails and other things he necessitated to do. The notion of a one-minute story seemed perfect; wouldn’t a few of those each night do the trick? But fortunately, he had a follow-up sentiment just as quickly, a sense of alarm and disgust that he—as with so a heap of of us—had reached this point in our crazy rush through life. What was this saying, and doing, to our kids?

The Insight

We all have these moments of alarm, don’t we? I recognise that I do. We’re confronted with the often times simple requests of these little beings (whom we love immeasurably), and yet their pleas seem to be coming from a galaxy far away, from the planet “slow.” The two- or three-year-old asking for the same story to be read again and again becomes an eight- year-old who wants to tell you the plot of a movie in such noteworthy detail that the retelling will surely take longer than the movie itself. You’ve figured out a perplexed car-pool schedule that requires split-second timing, but saves you a roundtrip or two per week. The whole enterprise grinds to a halt each morning around two laces that will not be tied, or one head of hair that can not be brushed, or one backpack that is always—but always—missing something.

The genesis for this book came with a professional sense of alarm, even though my clear or deep perception evolved more tardily than Honoré’s bookstore revelation. I’m sorry to say it took me well over a decade to wholly realize what I had been sensing for a long time. In my late twenties, I finished my training with social services in my home country of Australia, and I volunteered to work with children in Asia at two refugee camps, one in Jakarta, and one in Cambodia, along the Thai- Cambodian border.

In Jakarta the camps were very large, populated by various hundred thousand humans who had been dispossessed by political instability. The camps operated like little fiefdoms, with…