Simplicity Parenting by Kim John Payne, Lisa M. Ross Read Free Book Online Page A

“stuckness,” a pronounced rigidity of behavior. She is the one who, when the teacher explains that the field trip has been cancelled due to an impending snowstorm, will melt down.
    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. Remember when you were in college, and studying for finals? Or picture yourself (unless you are a perfectly calm, inveterate traveler), the evening before a long plane trip. If you have certain “tendencies” normally, then in stressful situations such as these you “become” those tendencies absolutely. A certain fussiness that you tend toward becomes almost frightfully manifested as you line your clothes up to pack, sorted by size, texture, and hue, darkest to lightest. Or imagine the third-grade teacher who has bravely taken on an ambitious class play. By performance time, she has the phone number of a counselor her friend recommended written on her hand because every single child is displaying, in full plumage, every latent tendency they have.
    This happens all the time, this sliding along the behavioral spectrum in response to stress. It’s normal and healthy. By dealing with normal stresses, children (and adults) develop ways to cope. They benefit fromcoping with difficult situations, as they build a sense of competency and self-trust. The very active child, the industrious little soul who becomes a whirling dervish in anticipation of the school play, can also slide back to a calmer state. Sometimes they need help in this, but the expansion and contraction is a normal process and cycle. It is one we all experience.

    As parents we must not become “harmony addicted.” It’s tempting to hope that every day might be a sort of “rainbow experience” for our children. Wouldn’t that be nice? If only we could suspend them in a sort of happiness bubble. But they need conflict. As Helen Keller noted, “Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet.” Children need to find ways to cope with difficult situations; they need to learn that they can. The feisty girl who has such strong feelings and a drive to make herself heard needs to experience that tendency. She may also need to be helped back to her more centered ways of seeing and dealing with the world. The movement itself is a healthy part of life, of building and developing character.
    When we overprotect, when we become so neurotic about the perfection of our children’s every experience and waking moment, we don’t protect them from sliding along the behavioral spectrum. We push them along it.
    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. Not only is it impossible to avoid, but this exposure is necessary in order to build up their own protective immunological front. We are not going to host our child’s fifth birthday party in a hospital intensive care unit, despite the immune-building possibilities. Yet we are often tempted by the other end of the parenting spectrum, looking to shield or vaccinate them from all manner of normal life experiences. By overprotecting them we may make their lives safer (that is, fever free) in the short run, but in the long run we would be leaving them vulnerable, less able to cope with the world around them.
    Overparenting creates a lot of tension. Our anxiousness about ourchildren makes them, in turn, anxious. 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. Parental anxiety can also slide children along the spectrum. American journalist Ellen Goodman said something that