Simplicity Parenting (21 page)

That’s not so strange, really. Alison’s full-time (developmental) job right now is to push Laura away, but on her “time off” she does what
also
comes natural to her. She can think of her mom as an alien one minute and, thanks to their broad and deep connection, snuggle with her the next. Adolescents can forget their current mission in life long enough to live in the well-worn groove of their connection to you. And as parents we need those moments of connection to get through the rest. Their hormones can’t repress the heart muscles entirely; those are trained and exercised by years of quiet, simple connection.

Relationships are forged in pauses … the ordinary, incidental moments that have extraordinary cumulative power. Every night, as a family gathers for dinner, they do “favorite things.” One by one, they mention something special from the day … something they did or saw, something that stood out. For the children it can be the dragonfly wing they found on the fence post, the mastery of tied shoes, the neighbors’ new kitten. For the parents, it can be an opportunity to make an acknowledgment: “Today I noticed how well you two made a plan and cleaned up the play space … and with no arguments. That was so helpful.” This simple affirmation—not overblown or sentimental—can be very powerful. When done regularly, it has all of the power of ritual, bookending the flow of time, focusing our attention and love. The day becomes colored by this evening moment, as you find yourself looking, wondering: What will be today’s “favorite thing”? What beauty can I notice in my child’s actions today?

Rhythms are like a place set for you at the table. An unquestioned invitation to participate, connect, and belong.

Family Dinner

In my years as a Waldorf teacher I noticed a curious phenomenon. A regular part of the kindergartner’s day is the preparation of a snack. This
process might include chopping vegetables for soup, peeling apples, or kneading dough for loaves of bread. Invariably parents would be dumbfounded to learn that at school their son or daughter ate whatever the snack was—vegetable soup or a warm porridge—with gusto.

“Impossible! Taylor only eats two things: bow-tie pasta with butter, or waffles.” Vegetable soup? How could this be? Throughout the year, parents would figure ways to visit the classroom at snack time, looking for the trick, the sleight of hand that would explain this miracle. They would look at the kindergarten teachers searchingly: “There
is
something magical about her … but what can it be?”

The magic, it turns out, is in the process. Children who’ve had a role in preparing a meal assume ownership of it. More simply: When children make the food, they’re less likely to throw it, or refuse it. In the wonderful world of the Waldorf kindergarten, “snack” is not just something to eat, it is an event. There is reverence associated with the whole process: the preparation, eating, and the cleaning up afterward. Everyone is involved.

Social scientists have scrutinized the importance of “the family dinner” since the 1980s, when it was clear that this once-sacred ritual was on the endangered list. Numerous years and studies were devoted to chicken-and-egg questions: Was it the quality of the time together that determined the effects? Were kids who did better in school more likely to come from families who ate dinner together, or was it the eating together as a family that influenced the kids’ better grades?

The answer, again, is in the process, not the particulars. Tonight’s dinner may not be a gourmet triumph, the conversation might ramble, and uninvited guests may join the family gathering: bickering, or underlying tensions from the day. Process, it turns out, allows for bad nights, bad moods, even (heaven forbid) bad food. Process (or rhythm) braids those particulars, with the golden moments, too, into a strong, unifying bond. This is what we do together, and mean to one another, good day, good meal, or bad.

Studies have shown that the more often families eat together, the more likely it is that kids will do well in school, eat fruits and vegetables,
and build their vocabularies, and the less likely they will smoke, drink, do drugs, suffer from depression, struggle with asthma, or develop eating disorders. The National Center on Addiction and Substance Abuse (CASA) at Columbia University did a ten-year study that found, among other things, that family dinner gets better with practice. The less often a family eats together, the more likely the television will be on during dinner, the less healthy the food, and, as rated by the participants, the more meager the talk and less satisfying, overall, the experience is likely to be.
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Blending the wisdom of the kindergarten, social scientists, and our own instincts, we can at least say this: The family dinner is more than a meal. Coming together, committing to a shared time and experience, exchanging conversation, food, and attention … all of these add up to more than full bellies. The nourishment is exponential. Family stories, cultural markers, and information about how we live are passed around with the peas. The process is more than the meal: It is what comes before and after. It is the reverence paid. The process is also more important than the particulars. Not only is it more forgiving, but also, like any rhythm, it gets better with practice.

In Chapter Three we limited clutter and excess in your child’s environment by simplifying toys, books, and clothes. Consider applying the same principles to food. My purpose is not just to declutter your pantry but to declutter the choices, judgments, and power issues around food, especially for young children. First, though, in keeping with our current emphasis on rhythm, we’ll look at simple ways you can emphasize the process around dinner. Or, to put it another way, we’ll look behind the kindergarten’s magic curtain to reveal how you, too, can serve vegetable soup that your child will eat.

The rhythm of dinner begins with its preparation, not the first bite. However you can manage it, involve your children. Even young children can poke the eyes out of a potato, wash lettuce, or just put forks by each plate. It takes more effort on your part in the beginning, but it lays a path for regular, more efficient help in the future. It also gives kids a stake in the meal, a “pride of authorship” that will influence their eating and their behavior. “How do you like it?” they’ll ask everyone, several times.

Involving kids in the food preparation will also help ease the transition to the table. If you’re pulling a child away from play, it is easier to pull them into an activity than it is to pull them into a chair. “Come on, Emma, I need you to give these peas a bath!” A child involved in something,
in the flow of a task, is in a rhythm of their own. By involving them in the preparation, you build a ramp up to the meal.

This easier transition is important, because you don’t want strong emotions—the lockdown of fight-or-flight—stirred up with your food. What can kids do with powerful emotions, when they so often feel powerless? Well, there are three areas where kids can exert control and win: eating, pooping, and sleeping. More to the point: not eating, pooping, or sleeping. When hauled out of play, kids can be ready for a fight. You sit them down to a plate of food and they’ve found a fight they know they can win. You can’t make them eat, it’s true, but with a little ramp building you can even the odds.

It’s nice to have some sort of symbolic start to the meal. My family observes a moment or so of silence. (We started with ten seconds). Some families share a prayer or a blessing; some observe the lighting of a candle. Again, the particulars are up to you. A family I know keeps a basket of Christmas cards they’ve received near the kitchen table. One night a week a card is chosen from the bunch and the sender is remembered, for just a moment, before the eating begins. All of these are essentially a collective breath, and a thank-you, whether religious or secular. Thanks to the cook(s), the farmers who grew the food, to those we love, or to the good fortune that brings the family together, safe and hungry!

The dinner table is one of a child’s most consistent laboratories for learning social skills (and impulse control); it’s democracy in action. It’s true, it may be a rare meal when you don’t cringe once or twice, imagining how your “dinner theater” might play to a wider audience. Your family may not be ready for that audience with the queen yet. But most of the rules are principles of basic fairness and graciousness. Plates of food are passed, silverware is used or bravely attempted, nobody leaves the table until everyone is finished; we ask and tell one another about our days.

Involving everyone in the cleanup is an ideal way to ramp down from the meal to the evening rhythms and activities. This continues the democracy of the meal: If you eat it, you might help prepare it, but you surely help clean up from it. The connection built through the meal continues, but on the move, as everyone assumes their own tasks, working together.

Simplifying Tastes

For most families today, the pillars of too-much certainly apply to food. We generally consume too much of it; we’re overwhelmed by too many
choices and too much information (advertising and marketing); and “too fast” applies both to what (fast food) and how (on the go) we eat. A sense of overwhelm, especially for children, can be the basis of poor eating habits and lifelong control issues around food.

Like the issues around toys and clutter that we explored in Chapter Three, food is another area of our daily lives that has become bloated (excuse the pun) with excess and pseudochoices. While I don’t claim to be an expert on nutrition, no dietary expertise is needed to lose some of the weight (again, sorry …) we feel around our family’s food choices. Just as I did with toys and clutter, I’ll offer some general guidelines on simplifying food.

Instead of a hypothetical “mountain of foods” in the center of your kitchen, imagine the huge expanse of your grocery store. Many now are the size of airport hangars, with the least processed foods (those that existed fifty years ago) located around the periphery. Intense marketing pressures are brought to bear on our food purchases. And like toys, foods are being marketed as entertainment, as treats that children deserve to enjoy. Who are we, as parents, to say no to their pleasure? Then there’s peer pressure. Food marketers, like toy marketers, capitalize on the notion of social acceptance, or “membership,” around food choices. “Tell your friends!” The pressure then circulates back to you, as marketers urge children to apply pester power to their parents. Lost your appetite?

My first suggestion for simplifying food, as with toys, is to limit choices and complexity. Simplify the number of food options available to your kids, and simplify the tastes and ingredients of those options by backing away from highly processed and sweetened foods.

To simplify foods we can follow many of the same principles we used sorting through the toy pile. These basic guidelines can accompany you down the aisles of your supermarket: Is this food designed to nourish, or to entertain? To stimulate? More simply, is this food designed, or was it grown? Did it exist fifty years ago? Is it unnecessarily complex, with ingredients you can’t identify or pronounce? There are seventeen thousand “new food products” introduced to shoppers in this country every year.
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Simpler foods, like simpler toys, tend to be the ones that last. And when you simplify your child’s food choices as you did with their toys, you release them from the pressures of too much; you allow for the development of lifelong healthy eating habits.

Remember the high-stimulation toys we identified in the toy pile? They were the ones with the screaming sound effects, flashing lights,
and revolving dials, designed to put your child’s nervous system into cortisol-induced overdrive. Here is a food parallel, quoted directly from the Frito-Lay website: “Turn up the volume of your snacking with the amped-up spices, high-decibel cheese, and the awesome crunch of Doritos brand tortilla chips. The bold flavors like Doritos Nacho Cheese and Cool Ranch are the loudest tasting snacks on earth.”

The problem with such foods, leaving aside their health effects, is that they hijack your child’s taste buds. They set the stimulation bar so high, children lose the ability to recognize and differentiate subtler flavors. The tastes (thanks to additives) have gotten bigger and bigger, more complex. How can a carrot compete with Hot Wings and Blue Cheese Doritos? Next to such extreme flavors most foods can’t attract your child’s attention, much less their interest.