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

I find both moving and elemental. I carry a tattered copy of it in my wallet: “The central struggle of parenthood is to let our hopes for our children outweigh our fears.”

    For the past five or so years I have been involved with my colleague Bonnie River in a research project looking into the efficacy of simplification as a drug-free approach to ADD, or attention deficit disorder. 4 I actually take issue with this label, because I feel that there is no deficit of attention in children diagnosed with ADD. There is an excess of attention, really. These kids can be very attentive, but they have difficulties prioritizing that attention. Their level of attentiveness is not always in accordance with the situation at hand. The acronym that I think more appropriately describes the syndrome is API: attention priority issue.
    Our study looked at fifty-five children from thirty-two Waldorf schools in America and Canada. These are children who clearly had attention difficulties, or API. In approaching the schools we asked for their most challenging children, the kids who might just as likely be hanging from the rafters as seated at desks. These were the kids who can hijack a class by monopolizing the teacher’s attention. For these kids we devised a simplification regime much like the one outlined in this book, but with particular emphasis on simplifying environment (including dietary changes), screen media, and schedules.
    We also simplified information by asking the parents to look at the amount of information their child was absorbing and to cut it in half. This cold-turkey reduction did not just include outside information sources, such as ESPN or Highlights magazine; it included dinner table conversation. The distinction is important because we tend to getbogged down in qualifying “good information” or “bad information.” We also tend to think of problems as “coming from outside.” The premise we wanted to convey with this approach was one of quantity, not “quality.” When you look at the information kids absorb on a regular basis there are certainly differences in quality and appropriateness. But we wanted parents to work toward an overall simplification, to dramatically reduce the quantity of information their kids were taking in from all sources.
    What we found is that 68 percent of the children whose parents and teachers adhered to the protocol went from clinically dysfunctional to clinically functional in four months. How is this possible, with no drugs involved? We did the study again. Once again we had strict screenings and testing both before and after the protocol. We got the same figures, exactly. Sixty-eight percent of the children went from clinically above the 92nd percentile on the Barclay scale (the commonly accepted psychological testing scale for hyperactivity and inattentiveness) to below the 72nd percentile, or functional, in that amount of time. Now, many of these kids would still be considered “rascals.” In the overall school or social community they might still be considered on the margins, or “fringe dwellers.” But they had clearly taken a step in from the outside. They had entered the general flow of family and school, play and regular life, some of the time. They had more than their toes wet; they were in the social and academic stream. And if they were still far from the fast track to valedictorian and prom king status, that’s all right. If they were still more on the fringe than in the center, that’s okay, considering how far they had come.
    How could this have happened? How could we get these results with no drugs involved? We’ve fully embraced the pharmacological approach to behavioral issues in America; there are now more than seven million children taking Ritalin. No other country prescribes psychoactive medications to children the way we do; Americans consume 80 percent of the world’s Ritalin. Our 5 reliance on pharmaceuticals is alarming by any standard. It seems,