Simplicity Parenting (11 page)

—RUDOLF STEINER

T
he threshold to a child’s room can seem like a border checkpoint; to cross it is to pass into a foreign land. In relation to the rest of the house, a child’s bedroom can be otherworldly, with its own terrain, microclimate, and definitely its own laws of physics. More items than there is physical space for somehow find purchase on top of piles, overflowing baskets, or in drawers jammed open. Under the bed there is some sort of superconductor magnet, sucking down all manner of things (who’s brave enough to check?) to rest among the layer of dust bunnies.

Walls are often invisible, plastered with posters, pictures, pen marks, plaques, and “wall units” (a form of vertical storage for things that no longer fit on the floor). Topographically, the stuff functions as an archeological image of the child’s commercial life so far: the deeper you dig, the earlier the toys. The room’s pastel color scheme and basic furniture—bed and now bureau where the changing table once was—are no longer visible, buried under a thick overgrowth of multicolored, ever-growing, and expanding stuff.

Of course, not every kid’s room looks like this. And certainly not every day. This image is surely an exaggeration. But based on my sampling of children’s bedrooms, I’m certain that many parents would recognize some aspect of their own children’s rooms in this picture. It is an
image by no means limited to wealthy or upper-middle-class families, either; the quality of the “stuff” may differ, but the quantity can be similar across class lines.

In my lectures and workshops, I’ve found that the issue of stuff—the sheer quantity of toys, books, and clothes that accumulate around a child—strikes a nearly universal chord. After giving a lecture with a broad overview of “simplification,” much as we covered in Chapter One, I usually suggest breaking into smaller groups to discuss issues more fully. When I ask parents to choose which of the four levels of simplification—environment, rhythm, schedules, and filtering out the adult world—they would like to focus on, the room tilts toward “environment” as most parents head in that direction.

Why do most parents want to begin by considering their child’s home environment? Why do they gather, hypothetically, at the threshold of their children’s rooms? There are two reasons. Certainly when one’s considering a big change, it’s easiest to begin with the tangible, the clearly doable. Simplification is a process, a lifestyle change that has several layers and takes time. It requires, as it builds, commitment. I have to agree that the environment we make for our children at home is an excellent place to begin simplifying. As a starting point it has traction. Simplifying your child’s room is eminently doable, and most people find that it provides results and the boost they need to continue.

Most parents also connect, personally and emotionally, with the issue. They are deep in conversation, already sharing their own moments of recognition and realization, as they gather. Despite what differences they might have—in terms of background, culture, income, or politics—they find plenty of common ground when they consider how their children’s rooms (and their homes and lives) have become deluged with “stuff.” They’ve already acknowledged, at some point or another, or perhaps several times a day, that this surfeit of stuff is oppressive. Yet perhaps never before had they thought of it as potentially harmful to their children. This profusion of products and playthings is not just a
symptom
of excess, it can also be a
cause
of fragmentation and overload. They hadn’t considered how too much stuff leads to a sense of entitlement. Or how too much stuff relates to too many choices, which can relate to a childhood raced through at far “too fast” a pace.

As I listen, I’m taken with the sense of surprise so many of us feel around this issue. It’s as though parents realize they’re on a runaway train, but they can’t believe they never noticed it speeding up. Even in the span of one or two generations, there has been a sea change, a flood
of items marketed to parents for their children. Or, more often than not, marketed directly to the kids. I sometimes jot down some of the comments I hear at workshops. I remember one mother saying, “My parents are quite respectful of my husband and me as parents; they don’t ever say much about what they did differently or what we should do differently. But I’ve noticed that whenever they come to visit, they are
amazed by
the number of toys Jared has. We don’t even think he has that many, compared with his friends, but my parents are truly taken aback, literally flabbergasted.”

As David Elkind points out, it’s only been in the past fifty years that inexpensive, mass-produced (overwhelmingly plastic) toys have flooded onto the market “in mass quantities and seemingly endless variety.”
¹
In his history of play, cultural historian Howard Chudacoff sets 1955 as a watershed year.
²
The Mickey Mouse Club provided a powerful new venue for toymakers, and for the first time Mattel began advertising a toy—the Thunder Burp gun—outside of the Christmas season. Almost overnight, Chudacoff asserts, children’s play became less focused on activities, and more on the
things
involved, the toys themselves. In researching her book
Born to Buy
, sociologist Juliet Schor found that the average American child receives seventy toys a year.
³
No longer reserved for special occasions, toys have become staples of family life, appropriate as purchases any day of the year.

Ubiquitous, too. A dad in one of my environment workshops was bemoaning how toys are no longer just in toy stores; they’re everywhere he goes. “It’s like walking through a minefield, any time I’m trying to get errands done with the kids. The gas station, the grocery store … There are always toys, always right by the counter where you’re standing, ready to pay. The other day we ran into the post office, and even there … There were little stuffed animals for sale. Who would want a little postal animal, for heaven’s sake? My daughter. As soon as she saw them.” Toys are everywhere, and nearly everything a child might need or use is now marketed as a toy: flashing shoelaces; transforming soap; character-driven school supplies, vitamins, and bandages; books with musical microchips; even scratch-and-sniff clothing.

In the workshop discussions, I’ve noticed an interesting progression, one that rarely fails to unfold. Early on, there are finger-pointing comments about which one in the couple is the most avid consumer, the biggest “pushover.” A mom might share how her husband “bribes” the kids with toys for good behavior as the husband (who really didn’t want to come to this lecture anyway!) crosses and uncrosses his legs, shifting
about on the metal auditorium chair. The comments are more pointed, of course, when the targeted spouse is not there. But invariably, as parents trade stories, they come to acknowledge that the weight of consumer pressure is huge, and felt by all, moms and dads alike.

Companies have found that they can enlist our children in their marketing efforts. By targeting kids directly, they can use “pester power,” meaning a child’s ability to nag their parents into purchasing things they might not otherwise buy, or even know about. Just how powerful is “pester power”? While couples may differ over whether Mom or Dad is more susceptible, researchers have found that children directly impact more than $286 billion of family purchases annually.
⁴
Marketers have more than taken note, increasing their spending on advertising to children from $100 million in 1983 to more than $16 billion a year now. And it’s working. The average ten-year-old has memorized three hundred to four hundred brands, and research has shown that by the age of two, kids can recognize a specific brand on the store shelves and let you know—with words or the ever-effective point-and-scream—that they want it.
⁵

Clearly nobody is completely immune to the marketing forces arrayed against us. Yet the less exposure a child has to media, especially television, the less vulnerable they will be to advertising’s intentional and unintentional messages. In her wonderful book
The Shelter of Each Other
, Mary Pipher discusses some of the unspoken lessons that advertisements teach us, and particularly our children:

• to be unhappy with what we have
  

• “I am the center of the universe and I want what I want now”
  

• products can solve complex human problems, and meet our needs
  

• buying products is important
  

These messages, over time, create both a sense of entitlement, and a false reliance on purchases rather than people to satisfy and sustain us emotionally.
⁶

I once offered a lecture called “Entitlement Monsters and the Parents Who Enable Them.” I thought parents might be reluctant to attend, given the title’s provocation, but the room was packed. We’ve all met a child, or many, who believe that the world spins to please them. They have everything imaginable, yet they feel beleaguered, cheated. Life’s many gifts and pleasures have made them somewhat passive,
world-weary at a young age. Yet that passivity has an aggressive “chaser”: If they feel they’re being denied, they can exhibit outrage, and razor-sharp negotiation skills.

How does this happen? Too many choices.

What’s so bad about choice? As adults, as Americans, as consumers, and as a society that values individuality, we love the notion of choice. And we love to give our children choices—like gifts—about everything they see, want, or do; about every aspect of their lives. We think that these choices help them on the road to becoming who they are. We think choices clarify a child’s personality, their emerging sense of themselves.

I strongly believe the opposite is true. All of these choices are distractions from the natural—and exponential—growth of early childhood. Let me frame it as an understatement:
Young children are very busy
. Their evolution in the first ten years of life—neural, social, and physical—makes what we do as adults look like standing still.

Children need time to become themselves—through play and social interaction. If you overwhelm a child with stuff—with choices and pseudochoices—before they are ready, they will only know one emotional gesture:
“More!”

Carl Jung said that children do not distinguish between ritual and reality. In the world of childhood, toys are ritual objects with powerful meaning and resonance. To a child, a mountain of toys is more than something to trip over. It’s a topographical map of their emerging worldview. The mountain, casting a large symbolic shadow, means “I can choose this toy, or that, or this one way down here, or that: They are all mine! But there are so many that none of them have value. I must want something else!” This worldview shapes their emotional landscape as well; children given so very many choices learn to undervalue them all, and hold out—always—for whatever elusive thing isn’t offered.
“More!”
Their feelings of power, from having so much authority and so many choices, mask a larger sense of vulnerability.

We are the adults in our children’s lives. We are the grown-ups. And as the parents who love them, we can help our children by limiting their
choices. We can expand and protect their childhoods by not overloading them with the pseudochoices and the false power of so much
stuff
. And as companies spend billions trying to influence our children, we can say no. We can say no to entitlement and overwhelm, by saying yes to simplifying.

Those parents at my lectures who convene in the environment workshop are invited to create a mental image of their children’s rooms. Stand with them, in those hypothetical doorways, or go right to the source, and identify the most obvious form of clutter. The answer, usually, is toys.

Toys

Imagine all of your children’s toys in a mountain at the center of their room. You’ve rounded up all of the outpost piles wherever they gather and grow throughout the house. The large bin of bathtub toys, the pile near your phone (which sometimes allows you to talk a moment longer), the ones stuffed into bins and drawers, the revolving bunch that always end up on the kitchen table … add all of these to the heap.