Simplicity Parenting

suspended, fully engaged in the moment. Our very best hope is that they'll develop their own voices, their own instincts and resiliency at their own pace. And despite how many times we forget, sometimes in a single day, we absolutely know that this will take time. 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. While parents may need software programs to keep track of their kids' activities and schedules, developmental psychologist David Elkind notes that children have lost more than 12 hours of free time a week in the past two decades. When multitasking is valued as a survival skill, should we be surprised when increasing numbers of our children are being diagnosed with attention difficulties? In every aspect of our lives, no matter how trivial, we are confronted with a dizzying array of things, stuff and choices. The weighing of dozens of brands, features, claims, sizes and prices, together with the memory scan we do for any warnings or concerns we may have heard. All of this enters into scores of daily decisions. Too much stuff and too many choices. If we're overwhelmed as adults, imagine how our children feel. Whichever came first, too many choices or too much stuff, the end result of both is not happiness. Contrary to everything advertising tells us, but obvious to anyone who has chosen a cellular calling plan, 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. Home used to be a parochial outpost and the outside world, the big unknown. Parents had trouble conveying all of the information that their children might need to face life in the real world, beyond the confines of home and neighborhood. Today the real world, in all of its graphic reality, is available for view anytime, any place via the internet. Our responsibility as gatekeepers is becoming exponentially more difficult even as it's becoming more critical. You've heard about how a frog dropped into a pot of boiling water will struggle to get out? Nothing surprising there, but it turns out that if you put a frog in a pot of cold water and slowly heat it to the boiling point, the frog will remain still, without any sign of struggle. Based on the families I've been privileged to work with, the hundreds of parents who've shared with me their concerns, and my own experience as a parent, I believe that the pot we're in today, as families, is increasingly inhospitable for us all, but especially for our children. 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. I know for a fact, and I've seen it many times, that parents can bring fresh inspiration and attention to the flow of family life. Without a doubt, as the family's architects, we can add a little more space and grace, a little less speed and clutter to our children's daily lives. My experience with many, many kids and families has helped me figure out ways to reduce the stresses, distractions, and choices, all forms of clutter, in children's lives. I've seen how effective these strategies can be in restoring a child's sense of ease and well-being. This book is about realigning our daily lives with the pace and promise of childhood, realigning our real lives with the dreams we hold for our families. 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. To have moments of calm, creative or restful, is a form of deep sustenance for human beings of all ages. Relationships are often built in these pauses, in the incidental moments when nothing much is going on. 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. If as a society we are embracing speed, it is partially because we are swimming in anxiety. Fed this concern and that worry.