Simplicity Parenting (6 page)

Why simplify? Over the years, as I’ve come to see how a child’s quirks or tendencies can be exacerbated by cumulative stress, I’ve seen how children can slide along on the spectrum from quirk to disorder when they experience high levels of stress. If I had a big chalkboard, I would write it as this formula: q + s = d; or: quirk plus stress equals disorder. This is especially worrisome in a society that is often quick to judge, label, and prescribe.

Imagine that wonderfully wistful child who loves to be in nature. He or she has a disposition for dreaminess. Very creative, like miniature philosophers, they can tell you a story that circumnavigates the globe before you see the possibility of a conclusion. This is the child who is great good company on vacation at the beach, but can be unbearable in the morning as the school bus is scheduled to arrive. If you add cumulative stress to this child’s life, he or she can just slide along the spectrum to ADHD, inattentive type. Their response to stress is to check out; that is their escape route.

Imagine the child who is, and always has been, a doer. She is the one who is at your right hand as you shop, always eager for a task. Or the boy who will do the vacuuming—doesn’t mind it—and always has some new trick or feat to show you. He or she is active in physical play, and is capable of attracting a whole group of kids—in the neighborhood or on
the playground—to whatever game they are playing. With a consistent pattern of stress this child can slide right into hyperactivity.

Another child you may recognize is the feisty one. If she thinks a teacher is picking on someone, or even if the biggest kid in school is bullying a friend of hers, this child will stick right up for her friend. She may be sticking up for herself more often than not, but she shows courage. She or he will stand up and be counted. A child like this feels things intensely, and has a strong sense of what is or is not fair. Add stress to his life and watch how quickly the child will be labeled as ODD. (To this day I read that as “odd,” but it actually stands for oppositional defiance disorder.)

Imagine the child who has a bird egg collection, or a stamp collection. His favorite things—and granted, he has quite a few of them—are all lined up on display. His room seems a bit chaotic to the outside observer, but he knows exactly where everything is. Or she knows where everything goes, and can be quite perturbed if someone “cleans” her room (it is more like archeology than cleaning). She has a wonderful memory for detail in general, and will be the first to say where your car keys are, or the last time you wore that particular outfit. With stress this child can slide into OCD, or just “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 from
coping 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 our
children 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 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.
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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 get
bogged 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
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reliance on pharmaceuticals is alarming by any standard. It seems, though, partly an outgrowth of popular views of the brain as our “control tower,” hardwired and fixed. With this conceptual model, the way to change behavior must be a form of rewiring. Such drugs as Ritalin and Adderall are promoted as rewiring in pill form. Another accepted analogy for the brain is a specific chemical formula, a kind of personal hormonal cocktail. If there is a deficit of serotonin in your brain’s mix, then, unfortunately, you may have ADD.
And if you see ADD as entirely a function of brain chemistry, and you see that chemical ratio as fixed, then only chemical intervention makes sense.

Our study counters the view that the brain’s “hormonal cocktail” is entirely predetermined and fixed. The impressive and clinically significant behavioral improvements we saw suggest that a child is affected by more than just the chemical levels in their brain, and the tendencies those levels influence. We all have hormonal tendencies. The anxious child has an abundance of cortisone that the body can’t fully assimilate; the very active child has tendencies derived from adrenaline. Individual children (and adults) have individual internal landscapes and drivers. What our study shows is that these chemical landscapes and drivers (hormones and tendencies) can be affected by changes in a child’s environment, and their lives. Behavioral tendencies can be soothed or relaxed by creating calm.