The Undeclared War on Childhood

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Ginny: Welcome to The 1000 Hours Outside Podcast. My name is Ginny Yurich. I'm the founder of 1000 Hours Outside, and I'm here with an author who has greatly impacted my own parenting. Kim John Payne. Welcome to the 1000 Hours Outside podcast.

Kim: Thanks, Ginny. It's lovely to be with you. It really is.

Ginny: Yes, I'm just so thrilled. It's really the biggest deal if you have read a book and I've had yours - I mean, it's dirty on the cover - This is Simplicity Parenting. I've had it for about a decade. The subtitle is, “Using the extraordinary power of less to raise calmer, happier and more secure kids.”

This is just one of eight of your books, but this one in particular is dog eared. I mean, I have gone back to this one so much, and I can't even tell you how exciting it is and to be able to sit across from you and to express my gratitude for your book and to have a conversation with you. 

Let me give a little bit of your bio, Kim as a consultant and trainer to more than 60 U.S. independent public schools. You've been a school counselor and adult educator, consultant, a researcher, an educator for four 30 years, a private family counselor for more than 15 years. You give keynote addresses around the world to educators, parents, therapists. You run workshops and training sessions. You are really helping so many people - children, adolescents, families. You talk about school difficulties, siblings, classmates, attention and behavioral issues, emotional issues such as defiance, aggression, addiction and low self-esteem. And then you're also a partner for the Alliance For Childhood in Washington, D.C.. You’re really impacting all over the world.

Kim: We’re all trying to do our best, aren't we?

Ginny: Yeah. And you're born in Australia. Yeah, and currently are in New England.

Kim: Yeah, that's it. Yep, I live on a farm up in the mountains of New England, right on the border of Massachusetts in Vermont.

Ginny: OK, well, it sounds beautiful. Well, could you tell us a little bit about how you became interested in this topic of children and helping them have a precious childhood?

Kim: It's like so many of us, life doesn't go in a straight line. It kind of just meanders around like it's like a mountain stream. 

To me, this journey began when I was working with teenagers in a group home. At the time, I was studying psychology at college, and I always hasten to add and I'm okay now recovered from psychology studies and then I was working in a group home for kids who'd had very, very hard lives. And I was attending lectures during the day and working in the in the home at night, and there was a fascinating, really very fascinating lecturer there who had been a doctor or a medic actually in the Second World War and one way back and he had been a doctor, graduated in the Korean and Vietnam wars, and he was talking about what was becoming known as post-traumatic stress disorder. 

As he was talking about symptoms of this, I kept thinking, “Well, that's oh my gosh, that's Debra back at the group home. Oh, that's Jamie… Oh, that's John. You know, that's Jack.” And yet he was talking about combat veterans. And I was thinking about the kids in my group home. And I thought, “What? But they're not combat veterans. What? What's going on here?”

You know, it's just that sort of that thought that won't leave you, you know? And he talked about combat veterans who weren't doing so well, who were nervous, jumpy, hyper vigilant, and were very over controlling. And I just kept thinking of the individual children and teenagers that I was working with. 

And it really set me on a path because after I finished training, I'd finished my training in college, I volunteered. I traveled and then volunteered in Southeast Asia and worked in various situations: inner city situations, refugee situations, just post Vietnam War in the Thai Cambodian refugee camps, in lots of different places. And there were nervous, jumpy, hyper controlling, very oddly vigilant kids, kids who would startle at anything - kids who were in what we know now as fight or flight or freeze or flock. I could get my head around it because these little kids were escaping war. 

All right. So I remembered back what Dr Taylor said at that university that I was all the time. I was corresponding with him and saying, “Here's what I'm saying that these are children,” you know, because my interest has always been with children and families. These are children. These are not soldiers. And he kept saying, “Look into this. Think about it. Explore it. Take notes. Keep a journal.” And so I did. I highly respected him, so I did, and I had no answer to it, to be honest. Absolutely no answer. Just observations, which I think in some ways is a good place to begin. And I just decided at his urging to study this further. 

So the only course I could find was in London, in the U.K., because back then, studies into what we now know as trauma were very few and far between. In fact, they didn't really exist much. You had to kind of put it together yourself. So where this little thread in one way the chapter ends is that in moving to London, I was studying back in the time of microfiche. Do you remember microfiche? Computers were not available just for ordinary use. 

And I set up a little counseling practice just west of London. And through the door came typical kids from typical, you know, racially mixed racial backgrounds, mixed economic backgrounds, just kids and their families. Only they were nervous, jumpy, hyper-vigilant, and overly controlling. They were just like the kids I had been with in my group home who had been abused and very badly treated. They were just like the kids in a wartime area. But here were kids from very typical life, and they may, for all the world, look like wartime kids. It was perhaps a few notches turned down, but they were certainly on that spectrum. They were on that path. And it was, you can imagine, it was actually quite disturbing.

Ginny: I would imagine it was fairly shocking.

Kim: Yes. Yes. And I held the thought, the observation at arm's length because it was too big. Yeah, it was too big a thought. But, you know, like a lot of those things that come up in all our lives, when they just keep returning, they just keep returning and returning. You know, I thought, “Well, OK, let's start looking at this.”

And so because I was studying that and I had good and wise people around me, I kept checking in with them. And what it was it was, I just got lucky. And one way is that I happened to catch the start of when brain imaging equipment was becoming available for psychological studies, particularly in the post-grad stuff that I was doing. 

Now I didn't have access to it personally, but the studies were starting to come out about the amygdala, you know, in about fight, flight freeze or flock studies were starting to come out that the amygdala had an accumulative memory. And that reasoning was formative. Because you see what I started to basically see is that these kids, they hadn't been in war, they hadn't been ostensibly abused. 

But what was happening was that they were living in the undeclared war on childhood. 

There was just too much too soon, too sexy, too young, but it had become normalized. And so what was happening to them was that the distress that they were experiencing was cumulative and they were in a perpetual moderate grade state, not a high level state like the kids in war zones, but a moderate like amber. It wasn't necessarily red, but it was very difficult for them to return to green, so to speak. 

They were in a state of high alert for much of the time because their systems were being overwhelmed with the pace of modern life that had become, as I mentioned, normalized and they were in an overwhelmed reaction. 

So that was piecing together, well, that's what we do right in life. When we join the dots. We attempt to, you know, join. I had no answers for it yet. And we can come to that in a moment, but that was certainly the observation. 

So with that observation, that stress can be cumulative, it doesn't have to be just a series of small, life-threatening events. Neurologically, children can be in a state of hyper alert and of overwhelm. The overwhelm comes first and then the hyper alert through. Now what we call the pace of modern life, and you have to remember this is back in the 80s.

Ginny: You know, that's what I keep thinking. I keep thinking your book Simplicity Parenting was so influential for me. I read it in the early, you know, in 2000, about 10 years ago, I read your book, you know, but what has changed since 10 years ago. And then you're talking about decades ago, you know, the pressures on childhood are just tremendous.

Kim: It's almost exponential what I think where for the first time in human evolution, the the amygdala that I mentioned, the fight or flight, the reptilian brain, it's sometimes referred to for the first time in human evolution. That part of our brain is actually enlarging. Its activity is actually enlarging and at a size that has never happened before. 

And I asked a friend of mine who is a professor of neurology of evolutionary neurology in Colorado. I said to her, “You know, the brain is very plastic, right? The children, this would adapt, wouldn't it adapt?”

And she said, “Hmm, that's an interesting question. Let me just look into that.” 

She got back to me in two weeks and said, “You know, the answer is kind of yes and no, but do you want the good news or the bad news?”

And I said, “All the good news.”

And she said, “Yes, it would.”

And I said, “Thank you.”

“Don't you want the bad?”

I said, “No, not really.”

And she said, “The bad news is that if we capped the level of increasing stress in children's lives today, if we stopped at. Today, and of course, we can't, it's increasing and increasing. Most 12, she took the normative data of 12 year olds. She said that for most 12 year olds their brains would be adapted if they lived 900 years without any further stress.”

So in other words, we've got 900 years ahead of our kids' ability as a society to cope with what we're throwing at them. 

We've gotten wildly… What's the saying in America? To be out of whack? Yeah, that's it. And we've gotten wildly, wildly out of whack. 

What in the face of that is as a mom or a dad is as I am, you know, I'm a dad. Like, What do you do in the face of that? 

And so maybe the answer was to simply simplify. 

Like if if stress can be cumulative, if it can build up over time and have this very triggering effect on children's behavior, on children's feeling of safety and security, that they're not safe, they're not secure and therefore they have to go into survival mode, which relates to a bunch of behavioral problems. Yeah, a bunch of diagnoses.

Then what about if we simply dialed it back? What about if we unstressed children in whatever way we could?

Ginny: You have so many ideas in your book, Simplicity Parenting. I think that this book is one of those ones that every family should read. I mean, there's so much in there, but you talk about and you call it cumulative stress reaction, CSR. So I just want parents to know that you talk about this and really explain it as a pattern of constant small stresses that this threshold of stress builds but rarely dissipates. It's not a traumatic event, but a frequency and consistency of small stresses. 

And so what might that look like for a child? You know, what does a series of small stressors look like that are not traumatic, but are frequent and consistent?

Kim: Well, you know, as a baseline to this and in further studies that I've done, you know, academically, more sort of rigorous studies as the years have gone on. I think I can kind of nutshell this in a sense to say that all children are quirky, right? They've all got their quirks. It makes them lovable and kind of infuriating sometimes. But that's their quirk. 

So they might be just a very busy child, you know, just very, very busy, always looking for things to do. They might be a child who's very organized, just likes things to be organized in their own quirky way because you look at it and think, seriously, that's organized. But to them, it is right now if you add cumulative stress to their lives, where there's just too many books, too many toys, too many too little rhythm and predictability, too many playdates, too much scheduling and a big one is too much adult information and screen based information. 

And we can back up on that in a moment, but just to name those big for what happens is that the little quirk starts to become inflamed. And I think of that as an emotional fever, it starts to become inflamed and as it becomes inflamed, that quirk becomes inflamed. It starts moving from just being a lovable little person into being problematic so that the very active child starts to become agitated. The very organized child starts to become more stubborn and the very feisty child - just a lovely little, little fiery one - starts to really push back really, very, very, very hard consistently. 

Now, if the cumulative stress continues and it's so hard, Ginny, because this is the new normal. Yeah, we're going to be very intentional if we want to do anything about this. 

But if the stress continues, then it doesn't just become problematic anymore. The playing with siblings just doesn't become antsy and disruptive. You know, when your kids have got a fever or they're headed towards a fever and their behavior is antsy and they're off their food a little bit. This is on a physical level. And we think, “Oh boy, well, OK, here we go. He has a fever cooking.” We all know that. I mean, sure enough, two o'clock in the morning… why is it always two o'clock anyway? But, you know, and they're getting and they're sick and they're shivering and they're, you know, and so on. We know when they're about to get a physical fever because their immune system is, for the moment, overwhelmed.

But when life is overwhelming our children, their emotional immune system starts to become fevered. It's almost the same.

Ginny: That’s a really good way to put it. You know, as a parent, if they stayed up really late the day before they were at a birthday party and they had too much sweets, you can, you know, you can backtrack and sort of figure out what's going on.

Kim: Yeah. And you see if we don't listen to the early signs of it and and we just keep going with too much with too many playdates, too much too is too much, you know, just too much adult information, particularly too much TV screens, iPads, just too much overwhelming their senses and they can't absorb it. They start almost like they're taking in, but they're just throwing it all in it, like emotional fever, like an emotional sweat. And they're tossing and they're turning emotionally, so to speak. 

Then what happens is that problematic behavior starts dangerously moving towards disorders.And there's no shortage of disorders waiting. 

I mean, there's no shortage of “D’s” waiting. And after 30 years of working in this field now and we have over 100 Simplicity Parenting coaches and group leaders around the world. So we've trained a ton of people and we get feedback from every corner of the Earth just about, you know, so this is not just my anecdotal observations. This is the observations of a small, quiet little grass roots, you know, folks out there working for simplicity. And by the way, that training is simple. It would be very ironic if it was complicated. Anyway, the feedback we get is really extensive. And what starts happening is the fact that disorderly behavior is an inflamed quirk. 

So now the busy child is now diagnosed with ADHD. Do you think it is such a silly name: ADHD? It's not attention deficit, it's attention excess. I don't know whoever thought that name up.

Ginny: In Simplicity Parenting you talk about misplaced attention. They do a fine job paying attention in certain situations but maybe not sitting at a desk at school.

Kim: Yeah, yeah. I call it attention priority issues. It's just prioritizing attention. Their attention is perfectly fine, perfectly fine. It's just not calibrated with what the environment is asking of them at that moment. 

So to say to a child, you're not paying attention is a disturbing statement to many kids because their attention is on that building that bridge over the puddle and they're paying perfect attention to that. 

Now the teacher is talking about language arts or whatever, but to say “You're not paying attention,” a young child trying to make sense of that. But that's another conversation. 

But what starts happening is that the disorderly behavior arises, it becomes inflexible. So the quirk becomes fevered and rigid. And what starts happening is that the busy child of the now who's diagnosed with ADHD? Well, maybe one doesn't want to pathologize children, which I'm a bit of a worrier, but not pathologizing children. But, you know, the behavior is just extraneous, movement can't settle, is agitated, is mis-timed or the child who is just organized in their own funny little way. Now they're rigid. And that's more going towards OCD, obsessive compulsive disorder. What the brain of that child is doing is pumping out adrenaline and cortisol because they're in fight or flight. They're now just trying to… they're not living each day. They're trying to survive each day. They're trying to deal with the overwhelm of each day. 

This is all a rather dark picture, you know, the undeclared war on childhood, that's a rather dark picture. But if more and more parents around the world are now trusting their gut instinct, saying something is wrong. So we never had to cope with this as kids, most of us. Something is seriously off. Something is wrong. That's the first thought. That's a very hopeful first thought we can have. Let that thought in that something is off about life and what is being asked of these kids. And once we we go to our gut brain rather than our cognitive head based brain, once we go to our instinct, which is where two thirds of our brain, you know, into our intelligence dwell, once we let that in and we stop looking around the neighborhood that all the other kids are doing this, we stopped listening to the the sports coaches were let go to train four nights a week. If we stop listening to the teachers who say they have to have two hours of homework a night, and they're just 10, 11 years old and and they don't always have to. We have to do all these things once we actually step back and say, “Really, do we have to?” That is a place that hundreds of thousands of parents are now starting to come to. 

And then if we start to unstress our children's lives and we look at it and say, “What can we reduce? You know, this week there's two playdates and a birthday party and there's practice for Little League Soccer. Hmm. Let's make that just the party. The play date can wait. And we're going to have two things, not four.” 

There is a piece of family cultural decision to start becoming almost judicious about almost like a gatekeeper. What do we allow into our child's nervous system? And what do we say no to or we say “Yes, and that can wait.”

You know, if our child's a little bit older and they want to do soccer and basketball too say “Yes, yes, of course you can do that love. It's so great. You want to do that. And we do soccer this season and then in the summer, we have a rest. And then in the fall we do basketball, but we don't do soccer and basketball right on top of each other.”

See, that kind of creative thinking is what people are doing all around the world now. After all these years of doing this, it still moves me when I hear these stories from parents who, you know, are kind enough to contact me and say, you know, when we started to unstress our children's lives, when we started to dial it back. We felt like we got our little child back. We got our boy, our girl.

And as we kept stressing as we kept just giving, it's almost embarrassing to say this, but just giving them a childhood. It's not complicated. As we continue to give them a childhood, this is the thing that their quirk, which had become their disorder, is now their gift. That is the genius you see, because the busy child who had become ADHD, their gift is they’re little warriors. But now their timing is right. They're saying the right thing at the right time to the right person at the right volume, because now the amygdala is not driving them. The frontal lobes in the brain have been given a chance because it's not their system that is not being bathed in fight or flight hormones. That busy child is now the mover and shaker. The children who wouldn't play with that hyperactive child because they were so unpredictable and kind of aggressive. Now everyone wants to play with that child because they think of really cool ideas and are inclusive, right? As opposed to being kind of crazy, kind of unpredictable and really caught up in their own stuff. And that is the same child. 

I'm not in any way pushing back against these diagnoses in one way. You know, in one way that they're not possible. You know, there's a difference between naming and knowing something. Or I think of it as labeling and limiting. Labeling and limiting is pathologizing a child. But you can name something as a child who is just being driven like this. And once you calm your nervous system down, that's the genius. The child who was just organized in their own little way but was now headed towards OCD or the feisty one - O.D. - or whatever. 

For example, a child who was neurodiverse or autistic. Those children, I mean the metaphoric garments they're clothed in. If you know what I mean, the filters between them in the world are very open waves. These beautiful children, that everything comes in. They just take everything in. Well, if a child who was neurodiverse, I presume to use that language rather than autistic, but a child who was neurodiverse and they're taking everything in the highly sensitive child included, then how wonderful that what they take in be worthy. 

I'm not suggesting we have them live in a bubble. I'm just suggesting we give these children a childhood and that we're somewhat mindful of what it is they're taking in. Are they taking in a bunch of violent media? Well, that's just like a neurotoxicity, you know, to children so and so on. And so are we having unguarded conversations about world events and all the things that are happening in the world that are scary in front of the little child? Well they're taking that in and their nervous system will become activated in not in a good way. You know, the whole sympathetic nervous system and vocal pathways, all that stuff that some of you, your community might know about and read about becomes very stimulated and activated because unguarded conversations in front of children these days has again become the new normal.

Ginny: I think I think David Elkind talked about that in The Unhurried Child, if I remember correctly, although it might be somewhere else. But he talked about how, you know, in decades past and generations prior, parents were very concerned about the emotional safety of their kids and not so concerned about the physical safety of their kids. So kids would be outside playing for hours with no adult supervision and, you know, then if they came in the room and the radio was playing and it was something stressful, a radio program, they would turn it off or adults would start these conversations and then they would stop them if a child walked in. 

But then that has flipped, you know. Now, we're very concerned about physical safety. You know, kids are not playing, they're not allowed to climb or to do these, you know, risky play behaviors, you know, mildly risky. But we have seemingly no concern for their emotional safety anymore, and it's been a massive shift in our culture.

Kim: There has been this shift and in a lot of that, I think a lot of that is not resting easy with us as parents anymore. I think there is an awakening happening. And because of this the forces that are afraid to try to actually, in a sense, have made a lot of it are marketing forces that are afraid to to sell families, not to sell kids' stuff.

Also, I'll give you a quick example, if I may. For the last five or six or seven years, I've tried to infiltrate the marketing conference and marketing to children's conference - tried to go undercover. But every time I apply, I'm rejected because it's a prestigious conference. And all they have to do is look up my name and there I am and all these sort of network television programs being rude about them, right?

Ginny: I didn't even know there were these things.

Kim: Yes. Yes. Marketing to children? Absolutely. 

So recently I got into one because of, you know, it was online, so they must not have been checking so much. Anyway, I got into this conference and there were all the big brands and all the software designers, the breakfast cereal, the clothing companies to children, the app designers, the auto makers, the auto car makers were there and so on. Because you probably know it's well-known now that if you can get brand loyalty before brand recognition before the age of three, you'll get brand loyalty before the age of six. And that means a child will buy that brand of car when they come of age to buy. Because that's when the brain is forming, right? So that's why you see these ads. I'm just picking cars as an example that very often feature children in the in and then will flash from the children to the logo of the car brand or the cereal or the clothing brand or whatever. The very fact that that information has been out there for a long time. 

But here's the thing that I discovered in this conference that I followed. I followed the feet where the little digital feet were going and I went to these workshops attended by several hundred people as a large group, and it was echoing the theme of the conference and the theme and the theme of these workshops. Heavily attended by far the best attended workshops at this conference were the removal of purchasing friction. Now, do you know what, “purchasing friction” is unique in your case? 

Ginny: It's the new name that makes it easier to buy it? You know, or I don't know. 

Kim: Yeah, I know, no, you're absolutely right. We have a new name as parents. We are now called by marketers… 

Ginny: We are the “purchasing friction.” Okay. Whoa.

Kim: The name of the workshop again was the removal of purchasing friction - no less than the removal of family and parental love, authority, authoritativeness and values.

And there were tons of case studies because apparently this began several conferences earlier and there were case studies being done into the successful removal of purchasing friction. And they even wrote it parentheses, a.k.a. parents. 

Ginny: Wow. The removal of parental influence. Wow. 

Kim: Now the way they do that, is it through various means? You know that if you buy this for your child, your child's going to love you and just think you're the greatest person ever? That's one way of doing it. 

Conversely, the other way of doing it is to have influences where the children are told to circumnavigate and simply just ignore their parents. And so anyway, there's a lot of information around that, and there were like little hands clapping on the screen with digital hands when they were presenting. And they spend $16 billion a year marketing to children just here, just in the United States, six billion dollars a year marketing to children and 92 percent of all their love of their collective's marketing budget is guess what they spend it on? 

Ginny: Screens?

Kim: Yeah. Screens. So I have a 16 billion dollar hand because all I need to do is pull the plug out. That's a $16 billion hand right there.

Ginny: Wow, that's powerful. That's what I love about your book Simplicity. You say “balance is elusive” To say “simply simplify” isn't as simple as it sounds. However, you just give the best ideas. I got emotional earlier while you were talking because I felt like, you know, you talk about that parents have this instinct, but sometimes we need a book like yours that lays it out and talks about it. 

I love this phrase that you say… “The extraordinary power of less.” You know - what a phrase. And so you know, your book has hope in it because like you said, a lot of this is dark and a lot of it is overwhelming. You know, you talk about societal pressure and obviously big business and these marketing dollars. But that the answer, you know, is just to pull back and use rhythms and you outline it in depth and make it very accessible. In your book Simplicity Parenting you make it exciting, you know?

Kim: Often people have kindly said to me, this is a very strange parenting book because they haven't used those words, but that's what it is. I'm not a big fan of parenting books, and I know that's weird because I write so many of them, but often parenting books subjugate us as parents. The book is primary, and the book tells you what to do and you feel like you're living inside someone's reality.

I was sitting at a dinner table once with two of the 10 and 12 year old girls and their mom and dad, and the mom was speaking in a way that even I could hear was inauthentic. She'd been reading some parenting book, and the two girls looked at each other, and the older one said to the younger one, “It's OK, she's reading another parenting book. She should be OK in a couple of weeks.” You know?

But what this book and I hope all the books I write, at least it's on my mind actively is as I write and as I do these workshops and lectures. And such is actually to make the parent and the parents instinct. That's primary. The book is absolutely in service of and this is a book that we're talking about today, but doesn't ask a parent to do anything at all. It just wants them to do less.

Ginny: And that's I think that's the permission that we need. I mean, one of the things that you talk about is that, you know, that parenting has turned into a competitive sport. You say parents struggle to know how to slow down. You say, we're accustomed… I actually think this is a really huge statement. You say we're accustomed to seeing our children's boredom as a personal failure. You know, and I think that that maybe is one of the key points, which is that it does feel like that and I don't know why it feels like that. So we're just stuffing these calendars full instead of stepping back. 

But then you have just such wonderful information about boredom and how it leads children to the best of things and, you know, to just give them time to unfold. And so, so it is this, you know, it's this pursuit of balance in this pursuit of just having a breath and a pause in your life. And that's good for everyone.

Kim: It's really got to do with offering kids times of decompression like busyness. Busyness is perfectly fine. You know, kids that get busy and excited and are off to a play date that they just love. And then the older children, they go to their turns to this, to the, you know, sports club or gymnastics. It's all good. Everything's good, it's just too much good. It's just, you know, it's all fine, but it's where the air we breathe, we breathe in, we breathe out. Where did the children's lives breathe in, breathe out? It's very important that they have moments of decompression. Now what do those moments of decompression look like? You see, because it's almost, you know, it's interesting. Ginny, what gives me hope, a lot of hope is that. 

But in the past, children having a childhood was just kind of natural, and I don't mean to look at it through rose colored glasses. It was just a part of the pace of life. We just didn't have the mechanisms available to us to speed it up so much. It wasn't always ideal by any means, but we just didn't have the mechanisms. Now we do. So what is really hopeful to me is that giving children a childhood has now gone from a wider cultural norm to an individual, family conscious cultural decision.

Ginny: Well, that's huge. Yeah, that's a huge statement.

Kim: Yeah. And we've got the power to do it. What can we do as a mom or a dad? In the undeclared war on childhood, oh my goodness, we can declare peace in our homes.

Ginny: Now that is powerful. I love this one. You know, you talk about, I think it just hits to the heart of what we want as parents. We want these slowed down experiences, you say, “In the tapestry of childhood. What stands out is not the splashy blow out trip to Disneyland, but the common threads that run throughout and repeat the family dinner. You talk about Saturday morning pancakes.” I mean, it's just so beautiful. Nature walks reading together at bedtime, you know, and I think as parents to have that permission to know that that's enough, you know, and that's and that's really what kids are clamoring for, are, you know, moments of slow in their life and moments of connection.

Kim: You know, it's interesting because I've been very blessed in my life to travel to many different cultures, right? And I ask parents when I'm just sitting and just little circles with them, you know, do a workshop. We do these little things and you know, we're sitting together just talking and I ask them about their golden memories. You know, I ask them, what's a golden memory from your childhood? Yeah. And in all these years, no one has ever talked about the splashy trip to Disneyland. No one, not one person. And I've asked tens of thousands of people how coaches have asked another hundreds of thousands of people. And I keep asking when we have our coach gatherings and they're big, they're like big sort of jamborees. Um, has anyone heard about the big, splashy thing? You know what people talk about? They talk about time in nature. Yeah, that is right.

Ginny: On all these podcasts I end with a favorite childhood memory outdoors. And you know, people are like, I loved walking through the dust and seeing the dust, you know, I mean, it's the simplest of things, you know, feeling my hand trickle through the cold water. And so it just gives you hope that as a parent that you know, you can do these simple things and they can be so long lasting and have such an impact.

Kim: Time and nature - it's almost like it gives a child time to reset. It's a time to come back into themselves. It's a time to dare to dream. It's a time to connect with this big, beautiful world that is so safe and secure. 

The other thing that people talk about is connection to friends. So there's nature and this connection to friends, and there's many stories about friends. And the third one is three that I've come to recognize as being three major themes is connection to family.

But all these things take time. Yeah, they take time. And if we can slow things down and allow time, it's like it's a little bit like in the book MoMo by Michael Ende. And he wrote in that book, there were these time bandits who may figure out how to control society. The simplest way to control society is to steal their time, and then they roll it up and smoke it, by the way. 

I do these little podcasts. Just little 10 minute simple little things. And the last one is called rushing, rushing. And because one mother said to me in China, she were the break time and she said to me, “Kim, when rush rush comes in, then trouble comes in also,” and she had this series of little sayings about rushing rushing. But when we're not rushing, rushing, then she then would talk about all the beautiful connections that family. 

Now it's not that the children still won't be antsy and push back against us. But when they do, it's more malleable. It's quicker to bring back in. 

We come back to boredom a little bit, because if we allow decompression time and allow and give the kids what I call, as you probably saw in the book, the gift of boredom. Right? Then they'll just kind of sit because one of the things that boredom does is that it's the precursor to creativity. It's the precursor to adaptability. It's the precursor to innovation because we're not presenting our kids and saying, “Oh, they're bored, okay, let's get them into another club. Let's get the playdate. Oh, just to see if I can organize. Hang on. Where's the iPad? I'll put the iPad on. Let's have another show.” Just let them be bored. 

Now the reason boredom and decompression and downtime is so important on a body based level, it allows the neurotoxins to actually clear the system and allows a child to reset every single day several times a day. 

But now, if I can move that out, if I may, to a much bigger scale that by 2035. And that's coming up relatively quickly. Over 75 percent, three quarters, according to the trade department, will be headed in that direction where jobs, where the way in which we earn our income, like when our kids are adults. So what I'm saying is that a vast majority of the way they will earn their living will be unemployed and will be self-employed, will be project based, will be part time. And what's often called tapestry employment - like the number of things that the kids put together. 

OK, now what's that got to do with right now? Well, he's going to answer my own question because they're always the easiest. Well, that's good to do right now is that when we allow our kids to have downtime to be bored, that's when the innovation comes up. That's when the adaptability, the creativity now is anyone listening today is ever being self employed? And you ask self-employed people, what does it take to be successful? These three words creativity, innovation, adaptability always come up. And a fourth word often comes up, and that's grit and problem solving. Anyone who's been self-employed part time putting it together knows that this is what it takes because no one gets you up in the morning. No one's going to problem solve for you. No one tells you what to do next. It's all you are coming out with this out of your own volition. 

And how did children gain that? They gained it through boredom. So I'm not doubting screens, for example, are creative. But they’re someone else's creativity, that is how a child passively watches someone else's creativity that is for the most part, not their creativity, it's just not ceasing. 

Sometimes people say to me in our cultures and group leaders, simplicity is like, “Oh, that's going back into the past. Oh, that's sweet. That's cute. That's going back into the past.” And I really beg to differ. It is not.

Ginny: It is preparing them for the future.

Kim: That is that that is what the future is, not might. That is what it will. According to the data, not just my anecdotal experience. That is what is coming down the pipe to our kids. 

So in giving them a childhood, in allowing them to build time, to build tree forts, which takes a lot of time because that will collapse three or four or five times before they get it right. And then it's really cool. But if you talk to someone in business, apparently the figures in business that for every 10 ideas, seven fail. But for every 10 tree forts you build, seven fall down when you're preparing them.

Ginny: I love what you say about in the long run, this makes parenting easier. I love this part. I got so many notes here. This book is so good.

“The rich and diverse habits your children will develop without television will serve them well throughout their lives. It will also simplify your parenting enormously over the long haul because your kids will find deep inner wells of creativity and resourcefulness. Better, more reliable babysitters do not exist.”

Kim: Oh, that is good. I don't even remember writing this.

Ginny: But it does. It makes parenting easier. You know, when we have the television on and I when I found your book, my kids were toddlers and. And so I noticed that, you know, if I have the television on, you know, that 22 minutes just flies by for me. I don't get done what I'm expecting to get done. And then I cannot pull them out of it. They're crying. They're upset. They don't want to turn it off. They want to do another one and another one. And what I found is that it's easier to just not do it at all. You know, and I'm not and we are not anti screen by any means, you know, we're trying to bring back balance and and to and to guard space in the calendar for play and to be outside. But you know, I agree with you that the best babysitter is when a child can play.

Kim: But what I hear you saying, if I can, if I can put it this way, is that you're not anti screen, you're just pro connection. It's not anti screen. It's pro childhood. It's not against anything. It's standing for connection to nature because the average American child in North America, the average North American child. This is way back. OK, I'll give you two figures in 2011, like 11 years ago now. The Kaiser Family Foundation study released the figures that the average North American 12 year old ,eight to 12 year old. And then, they took it through into the teens is seven and a half hours of screens per day per day. 

Now, the Common Sense Media Foundation followed that up in 2018 I believe the study was. It's now risen to nine and a quarter hours per day. Now it's OK, so there's a lot of toxic stuff going on with screens, but we know it affects the myelination of the brain. The learning habits study fifty five thousand kids over 15 years. I mean, the jury is in that screens are not good for our kids' brain development. 

But much more equally as concerning to me, is that if a child's watching just two hours of screen a day, right, just not nine in a quarter. But even if it's a couple of hours a screen that's a couple of hours, that they're not spending problem-solving, not spending, socializing, spending with their brothers and sisters, working things out with them, with their dad baking or. Whatever, just establishing warm human connection, that is two hours they have just spent. Being subjected to the removal of purchasing friction. 

Ginny: Yeah. Wow. It's such an imbalance. Have you heard the statistic from the National Wildlife Federation that the average amount of time that kids are playing freely outside in nature? Have you heard this stat? It's four to seven minutes a day.

Kim: And within minutes now, a day, four to seven minutes and put that alongside nine and a quarter hours on a screen, all you and I guess is saying and the people who were tuning in are saying is, can we get that back in whack, please? Can we get that if things can be out of whack, can things be in whack anyway? I don't know. 

Ginny: And that is actually our mission, which is to balance nature and screen time. And like you talk about, this is simple. It's not easy to implement, but that, but the idea is simple. And so we get the same feedback, which is like, this has changed my life. This has changed childhood simply by leaving space, by opening up space for kids.

Kim: Yeah. You know, one of my colleagues, a woman, a medical doctor, Victoria Dunkley has been quite influential on me, her work. Her book is called Reset Your Child's Brain and what she does, Victoria Dunkley. Maybe you can put that in the show notes. Because yes, it's a wonderful website. It's a wonderful book. 

Just about every parent I work with, and I still have family, you know, parent coaching and counseling practice. To this day, after we finish talking, I'll be speaking with a half a dozen parents today. You know, that's what I do. And just, I'd say sort of at a guess, five or six out of 10 parents that I work with when they call me saying, you know, this behavioral problems, there's issues going on. 

If those parents have children exposed to screens, I ask them to take the one month's brain reset and coach them and how to do that, how to walk onto it, how to do it sensibly. And just yesterday, actually a parent just said it is astonishing the difference in behavior, and I'll put something up in the coming weeks on our website. What she said was so crystal clear. She said my child's behavior has now become softer, more gentle. The sibling rivalry and fighting that was going on, which was intense, has now and she said, “stopped” and I said, “stopped?” and she said, “stopped.” And she said the children - already their schoolwork is improving. 

Now a lot of this we shouldn't be surprised because we're moving the children from dopamine addiction. And let's make no mistake, screens are designed to be addictive, right? The dopamine levels, the pleasure, the reward, the quick pleasure and reward loops once we free the brain from dopamine addiction to the frontal lobes, of course, our kids grades are going to go up. Yeah, of course, their social and emotional intelligence and interactions with others is going to improve. It should not be surprising to anyone when we release a child from an addictive cycle. A compulsive at the very least, like you were saying, Ginny, you turn it off and you get almost like a withdrawal reaction from kids

And so Victoria Dunkley's work is basically saying, free your kids from this for 28 days and then make a decision about whether you want to go back into it. And in all these years of doing, I used to do a screen reset quite a long time before Victoria wrote this book, but her work in it is much more elegant than mine, and she really has figured this out. And she's a very respected medical doctor, you know, and she's been quite influential. I haven't yet come across a parent who has gone back to heavy screen use for their kids. Most say it's gone. We're not doing it. And then and then my advice always is to reintroduce the screen slowly as the kids get older around 12-13 as a tech tool, not a tech toy. 

So it's a tech tool and how to coach them because again, I'm not anti screen. I used to teach information technology and computer science in high school. I'm not anti screen. It's the right thing. And we've known this for years. It's the right thing at the right age, in the right way, at the right amount of time. Yeah, that's all. That's all we're talking about here. And after that, the 28 day reset. Most parents say it's gone. There are some parents of young children who will say, Well, we'll just have movie night on Fridays now when? And that's perfectly fine, of course. But when you do that and you introduce a little bit of dopamine, I always counsel those parents to be very careful with screen creep. It's what I call screen creep. Is that good? It'll move out. And then if you can hold it to being, you know, really just that until you make a very conscious decision, extremely conscious about, OK, we're going to increase it to this. Don't allow it to creep because dopamine. Dopamine, compulsions and addictions, they work in very quiet feet and they move out into your lives more and more and more. So that's Victoria Dunckley’s work, and it's very aligned with the work you're doing.

Ginny: Yeah, I'm excited to look into it. Well, you know, Kim, I do a lot of these interviews and and so often, you know, it runs the gamut of someone's book. But this has only scratched the surface truly. I mean, I have all this stuff here. You know, we're running out of time, but you know, I just really highly recommend Simplicity Parenting. You have another book coming out and you have seven other books besides this one, besides Simplicity Parenting. 

But you have a new book coming out this June called “Emotionally Resilient Teens and Tweens,” which just seems like the most timely title to be coming out this year. Can you tell us a little bit about that book?

Kim: Yeah, that book arose that I co-authored with my dear friend and colleague Louis Mendoza. We also teamed up in the book, “Beyond Winning: Smart Parenting in a Toxic Child and Youth Sport Environment.” So we took on the whole toxic sports, the children and how to make that healthy. 

In this book, “Emotionally Resilient Tweens and Teens” we take on the topic of kids that are dehumanized. Marginalized kids that are teased bullied are pushed to the edges of friendship groups, kids who are cyber bullied, kids who are not included. And what we do is that we give very, very specific help to parents in how to coach their kids into how to how to break the cycle of disempowerment, how to how to stand within their own power and how to be much more resilient to a lot of the pressures socially that are coming at kids that age.

And then that's the first half of the book. And then the second half of the book is 10 stories - real stories with real dialogue that parents have been using for years and years where parents can take one like, it's like a topic. Let's say it's of rumor spreading like a lot of a lot of marginalization teasing, and I don't tend to use the term bullying a lot. The term I use is hyper controlling behavior.

In these stories we give, it's in the, I hope, well crafted stories of how they're told through the voice of the 18 19 year old looking back at when they were 10, 11, 12 nine at what their situation was about rumors being spread, about being cyber bullied, about being excluded from a friendship group, about trying too hard to fit in. About all that stuff that goes on in these years and how what they did made it worse had made it much worse. And then a point of realization and then how they made it better by themselves with their parents beside them. So it's not relying on the school to step in. I find that that is a long wait for most kids. I don't mean to be critical of schools, but it's much more powerful to coach our own child up and to work with them, to figure it out and for them to stand strong in an environment where they're being excluded from the friendship group or whatever it is. And then it brings our connection to our kids so, so much closer. So these stories, these stories are a way to reach children, not just talk, but these. And then just to read the story with a child, with a tween, with a teen, and then to sit down and talk about what in that story could you do? What's in that story for us? And then and then the child goes out and actions those points and usually the marginalization, the so-called bullying. Usually it'll stop within about seven to 10 days. It's done. It's over. It's in the rearview mirror.

Ginny: Wow. Is that powerful? This book is needed.

Kim: Yeah, yeah, it's long overdue. If I may say and yeah, that's it was a bit of a…. I wonder how it will go because it's a little tiny bit of a have to cross my fingers and lead writing this book because I wrote it in stories that really show more. Slightly more than half of the book is stories telling stories of different marginalization and different emotional struggles, and how do we overcome them?

Ginny: It reminds me of what you said earlier about the mom that's at the restaurant, and she sort of just spitting back parenting information. But we learn so much through stories, and I think we connect to them and then it helps the child to remember, Oh, this kid did that. And so I can, you know, try these tools. So I really hope we can have you back, you know, to talk about that book, you know, closer to the summer. And we always end with what can be real quick here, but a favorite real life, you know, de-stressed, childhood, slow outdoor memory of yours.

Kim: Oh, one that immediately comes is being down at the river with my father. And there were reeds growing up by the river and some were green, and some toward the back were dry and making these amazing tunnels literally weaving in the the the the reeds, making these tunnels through the reeds and making these big openings of rooms and spending days doing this and then inviting my dad to climb in with me. And he was far too big, but so he got on his belly and crawled in and then sat like a little gnome in this big room that I had made. So it's both a memory of many, many hours designing these, designing my palace as I called it. It had a look out. There was a tree growing up, so there was a look out. My dad even got up with me to the tree. But it's a memory of nature, but it's also a memory of my dad and it's kind of a connection to my wonderful father.

Ginny: Yeah. Oh, that's beautiful. One of the quotes you have in your book that I want to end with because I think it's so profound. You say, “Rescue their childhood from stress and they will inevitably, remarkably day by day, rescue you right back.” And I think that I think that at the crux of it lies this better life for all of us. It's for the kids. But then that permeates into our family life, into our adult life as well. So Simplicity Parenting, using the extraordinary power of less to raise calmer, happier and more secure kids. Kim, thank you. From the bottom of my heart for your work, for your influence and for taking this time with us today.

Kim: Oh, just so lovely to talk to Ginny and all power to the work that you are doing too is remarkable.

Ginny: Thank you.