Simplicity Parenting (17 page)

Scent, Lighting

Before we turn off the light and close the door to your child’s room, here are a few more suggestions for simplifying.

The amygdala, the ancient part of our brain, is the area associated with olfaction, or smell. Most of us have read or heard concerns about the ill effects of toxic chemicals in some cleaning and home care products. Many products, from “air fresheners” to candles to various soaps and cleansers, come with their own mix of chemical scents. So in a world that booms and buzzes, especially for children, you also have a cacophony of smells. Too many smells. All of these competing, chemical perfumes get the amygdala firing, and cortisol and adrenaline pumping.

Simplify the smells and perfumes in your home, particularly in your child’s room. One of the things that quiet the amygdala and promote a sense of safety and well-being for a young child is their own, albeit very subtle and fine natural scent, and the smell of their mother or father. When we surround ourselves with chemical smells and perfumes, we miss out on an opportunity to calm and connect with our children. Be careful of perfumes and these chemical scents, particularly in an age when so much adrenaline is pumping through our little guys’ systems.

I travel a fair bit, giving talks and workshops, and when I am away, my wife snuggles into bed with our girls to read before bed. One of them will grab “Daddy’s pillow” and add it to the mix so that my scent can also be with them as they listen and relax into sleep. Little ones find this sensory connection very soothing.

An easy way to minimize the sounds in the home environment is by softening some of the reflective surfaces. Many people have wooden floors and ceilings, and a lot of wood and glass in their homes, which offer clean lines and a natural aesthetic. However, children sometimes have difficulties with auditory processing. Some kids have trouble having the auditory senses that they take on board actually make sense to them both on the brain-based level and also a visual-spatial level. In other words,
environments where noise bounces around a lot can confuse children. When your children are young, it may serve to have rugs on the floor, and to drape some cloth on the ceiling in their room. It does not need to stay that way forever, but particularly up until the age of about eight, you can take steps to soften and simplify the acoustics in your home.

Consider the different levels and varieties of light in your home. Beyond the natural light from windows, we may have fluorescent lights, and the flickering glow of computer and television screens. School-age kids can spend a good part of their day in the often harsh lighting of the classroom. Again, this is a simple suggestion, but I have found it wonderfully powerful to have at least one point in a child’s day that includes the light of a candle. It may be just before bedtime, an interlude between day and night. If you are nervous about candles in the house, you might want to incorporate it into bathtime, when you have a whole tub full of water nearby. Children love the light of a candle and the magical circle of its glow.

Winters in the Northeast are long and dark. My eldest daughter, who gets up earliest for school, loves coming down in the morning as there is a candle lit just for her to eat her breakfast by. Somehow the darkness of the outside adds to the peace of a candlelit morning. Like an inhalation, the light draws us together as we start the day.

Children who have trouble sleeping at night sometimes have lighting systems more elaborate than airport runways. I suggest slowly weaning them off their various lights: the light in the bathroom, the hallway, the three night-lights, and the bedside light kept on “while they fall asleep.” Let natural light be the last that is curtained at night and the first that is welcomed in the morning. Most small children can sleep right through loud noises, but they are very sensitive to light. Especially for children who have no nighttime concerns, wean them gradually off every light, even night-lights, so that the quality of their sleep will be deeper and more nourishing.

As you close the curtains, and turn off the last light, sit for a moment in the darkness of your child’s simplified room. Imagine it as an environment. Their childhood paths, like dotted lines, will extend from here … out into the yard, to friends’ homes, to school and the wider world, but those lines will always pivot back. The dotted lines return, around the apple tree and through the open windows of a summer evening or through the black closeness of a cold winter night, to the circle of light around their beds. To stories about the day, or the angle of an open book shared in the moments before sleep.

By simplifying, you’ve taken steps to curb the excess that threatens childhood’s natural rhythms and growth. By starting at home—embracing experience over things, and “enough” rather than always more—you’ve made room. You’ve cleared out space, literally and emotionally. You’ve made a container for relationship and the slow unfolding of childhood. You’ve allowed room for your child’s own imagination and their explorations through play.

It’s a small environment, an even smaller circle of light we draw around those we love. But for a while, when they are young and growing, we adults can offer the protection of more time and ease, less speed and clutter. We can be the stewards of our child’s home environment, setting limits and saying no to too many choices, too much stuff. As we’ll see in the next chapter, we can also increase the security of the environment we make for them with rhythm and predictability.

Imagine your child’s room …

• uncluttered, and restful to the senses.
  

• with soft light and colors, and a sense of order and space.
  

• with room to move and play, to draw and build.
  

• without toys that are broken, forgotten, or heaped in piles.
  

• with a few of his or her most beloved toys in sight and the rest in one or two baskets on the floor, covered with cloth.
  

• with a place for a handful of books, while others are stored, ready to be cycled in once these are thoroughly read and enjoyed.
  

• as a peaceful and secure place for sleep, with the natural scents of home and minimal or no night lighting.
  

Imagine …

• watching your children create new worlds and new ways to play with their toys, instead of their requiring new toys to play with.
  

• opening your child’s bureau or closet and seeing space around a few clothes that fit her and the current season.
  

• your children’s own real tools and their happy sense of purpose as they work and play at cooking, cleaning, and gardening.
  

• your child being able to live deeply and repeatedly in the “now” of a story or his or her play, rather than always eyeing what’s next.
  

FOUR
•
Rhythm

L
ife today for most families is characterized more by randomness and improvisation than rhythm. Tuesday wash day? Cookies and milk after school? Sunday roast beef dinner? With both parents usually working outside the home, these kinds of weekly markers may sound more quaint than realistic. Family life today often consists of whatever is left over, in terms of our time and energy, when the “work” of the day is done. Whenever I ask a mother or father to describe for me a “typical day” in their home, nine times out of ten they begin by saying there is no “typical.”

There aren’t many people whose lives are still characterized by the rhythms of the earth, by the sunlight in a given day, the growing or fallow seasons, the cycle of a crop’s harvest. Yet our lives are still influenced by rhythms: academic, work, sleep, holidays, and circadian, to name just a few. Work and commuting schedules may rule the clock, but they are regularly irregular. They can change and evolve, overlap and fall short in ways that we have trouble keeping up with, and keeping straight. We impose the rhythms of our children’s lives. And as those patterns become less natural, regular, or decipherable—“Don’t forget, we’re heading into third quarter selling season, so I’ll be late all this week”—they are well beyond a child’s sensory world.

A baby’s first lullaby is its mother’s heartbeat in the womb, a powerful rhythm that we try to re-create with gentle sounds and rocking in their first weeks, months, and even years. You can always recognize a new mother or father, can’t you, even when they’re away from their baby? They’re the ones in the grocery store line, or at the bus stop, gently (and unconsciously) swaying back and forth. Whether babes in
arms or toddlers on their fathers’ knees, little ones crave that motion … the rocking motion. The tempo is echoed in their breath, the beating of their hearts. Rocking is also the surest path to sleep, a rhythmic road of harmony and calm.

Just as night is replaced by day, children learn that there are movements and changes that, with their regularity can be counted on. Games of peekaboo reinforce the notion that things disappear and reappear. A child’s sense of security is built on these predictabilities. The rocking motion continues on the swing, and the rhythm is then picked up in language with repetition and rhyme.

Day becomes night becomes day; when we’re hungry we are fed; the people we love leave and return. These rhythms correspond to a child’s way of knowing their world. With security they can venture out—with the promise of a return, they can explore—and this cycling will be their pattern of learning throughout their lives. Children depend on the rhythmic structure of the day—on its predictability, its regularity, its pulse. They benefit from dependability and regularity throughout childhood, but especially in the first three years, when the greatest learning takes place unconsciously. Not only can children find security in the patterns of daily life, they can begin to find themselves. In the day’s most regular rhythms, its high notes—the meals and bathtimes, the playtimes and bedtimes—young children begin to see their place in the comings and goings, in the great song of family.

In talks or workshops, when I begin to address the importance of rhythm in daily life, there is always a corresponding noise from the audience: parental fidgeting. I’m certain that for some, especially the couples who managed to come together, it took all the planning of a high-level military operation just to get them in the same room at the same time. And here I am, going on about rhythm. Rhythm? Some blended families have teenagers and toddlers whose schedules have little musical commonality. Some parents’ work schedules gap where they don’t overlap, or change just as soon as the family has adjusted to their patterns. Rhythm? Imagine how that sounds to the mom whose “typical day” goes something like this: starting at six with breakfast, kids dressed and lunches packed, kids to school, hectic workday followed by important client dinner, a mad rush home to tuck the kids in, dishes, line up backpacks for the next day, and its then—at 10 P.M.—that she notices the slip “reminding” her that tomorrow is her day for “Second Grade Special Snack”! Rhythm?

Meals, sleep, work, school, play, sports, errands, day care, classes, appointments, and friends: Those are a lot of pieces to fit into any framework. To do so with a sense of rhythm and regularity is asking a lot. It’s asking more than some of us can manage. In fact, the mere subject of rhythm can bring tears to some parents’ eyes.

Here is my good news/bad news response to these very understandable frustrations: Increasing the rhythm of your home life
is
one of the most powerful ways of simplifying your children’s lives. If you see that as bad news, here’s the good news: It will also simplify—not complicate—yours. And it can be done. It
can
be done.

What is so overwhelming about the notion of rhythm is that we assume we need to organize all of the moving parts of our lives into a full-scale symphony. Parenting is hard enough. While parenting involves a lot of “conducting,” the whole concept of rhythm—or anything approaching music—can seem impossible. And for some families it will remain elusive. Not to worry. Even if your schedules and lifestyle defy all taming, I’ll show you how to give your children greater predictability and transparency. These techniques will provide a sense of security, and they often establish a toehold for a more rhythmic home life, much to everyone’s surprise. And benefit.