Simplicity Parenting

Simplicity Parenting — Summary

Kim John Payne spent years working in refugee camps in Asia. With children who had lived through war, loss and starvation. Then he moved to England, trained as a Waldorf teacher, and opened a private practice outside London. Plenty of families came to him where, on the face of it, nothing was wrong. Two parents, a warm house, a good school, a bedroom crammed with toys.

And he kept seeing the same thing.

The same watchful, anxious eyes. The same rigidity, the same permanent readiness, as though something might happen at any second. Only now in children whose lives had never held anything terrible. Payne spent years looking for the explanation, and what he found is uncomfortably simple. In the refugee camp, one enormous trauma had overloaded those children's nervous systems. In England, several thousand tiny ones had. Not one of them was serious on its own. Together they weighed exactly as much.

This book is about those several thousand small things. It answers four big questions. Why is a child full of stress even when nothing is wrong with him? Why does his behavior improve when there is less stuff around him? How do you build rhythm out of a day that keeps falling apart? And how much of the adult world should we let in? If you don't have children, don't put this down yet. Payne's four too-muches are exactly what takes your own day apart.

Eight years old, and an expert on climate change

Payne shows what those several thousand small things look like inside one child's life through a single case. James was in third grade when his parents brought him in. A bright, educated family: his mother worked in higher education, his father at city hall, and both followed politics closely. The news channel ran in the background almost all the time. They talked to James about the world the way you talk to an adult, and he picked it up. At eight he knew roughly as much about global warming as the US vice president.