Attaching to God: Neuroscience-informed Spiritual Formation

122 Constructing Calm: A Guide for Families in a Fast-Paced World (with Sarah Boyd)

• Season 7 • Episode 122

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Have you felt overwhelmed and flattened by the sheer amount of noise and distraction in your home, your schedule, and your brain?  In our fast-paced culture, is it possible to set up our families and children to thrive?

In this episode of the Attaching to God podcast, host Geoff welcomes Sarah Boyd, writer, child development expert, and founder of Resilient Little Hearts. Sarah discusses her new book, Turn Down the Noise: A Practical Guide to Building an Emotionally Healthy Family in a Chronically Overstimulated World, a practical guide to creating emotionally healthy families in today's overstimulated world. They delve into topics like self-regulation, co-regulation, the importance of play, simplifying home environments, and the balance between stress and joy. 

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Introduction 

Geoff Holsclaw: . Have you ever felt overwhelmed or maybe f flattened by the sheer amount of noise and distraction in your home, in your schedule, or even inside your brain and our fast-paced culture? Is it possible to set up our families and our children to thrive? That's what we're talking about today.

Welcome back to the Attaching to God podcast where we're trying to smash together a neuroscience informed spiritual formation. And as always, we're brought to you by Embodied Faith. And today we have Sarah Boyd on with us today. She is a writer. She's also a child and adolescent development expert and founder of the Educational Company, resilient Little Hearts, and she recently released a book called Turn Down the Noise, A Practical Guide [00:01:00] to Building an Emotional Healthy Family, and a Chronically Overstimulated World.

Sarah, thank you for being on with us

Sarah Boyd: Oh, it's my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Geoff Holsclaw: And you have written a practical guy. There's so many practical kind of tips and so there's tons and we won't be able to get into all of it, but I just want everyone to know it is very practical. 

Sarah Boyd's Background and Journey

Geoff Holsclaw: But can you tell us just a bit about yourself and then like how you got into the work you do and then writing this book?

Sarah Boyd: Yeah, for sure. We were just chatting before I, I actually started, I started studying psychology after school and then went into youth ministry. So I worked in middle school and high school ministry as a pastor for about five or six years. I. And that's really where I just felt the call to grow more in my studies.

And so I enrolled probably not. A good idea to do it full-time, but I did a one year full-time master's in educational Psychology. But it was literally on the very last day of that course, it [00:02:00] was a Friday morning and I had just been up all night, all week, finishing my final thesis and was ready to go into the university and submit.

And I got an early morning phone call from my doctor saying that he was clearing my, his schedule and I had to come in immediately. And that was when I began the diagnosis. I was diagnosed with cancer. And so it was just this huge juxtaposition of going through the study. And then I went through 18 months of treatment for an aggressive form of thyroid cancer, which I was just blessed to be in remission.

And then when we were given permission we fell pregnant with our first child of two children. Now, and it really was all of those things combined that just made me so cognizant and aware that I cannot protect my children from this world. They're gonna go through things and that really what we wanna do is help create relationships and help them have [00:03:00] skills, develop skills to be able to be resilient and emotionally healthy, and also grow in their own.

Spiritual growth as well. So that's really where I started Resilient little hearts. And so we create resources for parents, teachers, and professionals, and just helping them understand their children and what they can do to help them grow in those areas.

Geoff Holsclaw: Oh, that's great. Jumping into the book and I lo we're gonna get back to this questions of resilience and emotional health, but going to the title, like Turn Down the Noise and a World Full of Overstimulation, what do you mean by the noise that we need to turn down? What are the challenges that fam, that you see families facing these days?

Sarah Boyd: Yeah, I think the metaphor came from it's a bit of a hat tip to CS Lewis' Screw tape letters where he talks about, the two characters talking about. We'll make the whole world a noise in the end and they won't be able to hear the melodies and silences of heaven because really that's what's happening in our world today, and was true back then when CS Lewis wrote it.

But even more true now is [00:04:00] that the world is becoming really fast paced. And so the noise refers to everything in terms of cognitive overwhelm the online world and. Media, and not just social media, but all the interconnectivity that really impacts home life now. I never used to. Parents used to go to work and then come home and be with family, and now it's all just enmeshed and entangled.

The pace of life increasing thinking about decades ago where all the stores would close on a Sunday or there would be, just natural built-in boundaries into society. That has increased as well. And then we can see in the educational system that there is more pressure for performance than there used to be decades ago, which particularly for elementary aged children that doesn't necessarily correlate into higher performance, or academic benefit.

And so all of this noise we see that children are reporting. Higher levels of anxiety and depression and a intentional diagnoses. [00:05:00] Parents are reporting exhaustion and burnout, and it's obviously multifaceted, but I wanted to contribute an idea that in some cases it can be because of the buildup of this overstimulation and overwhelm.

Geoff Holsclaw: Yeah. So you've touched on it a little bit, but what's the noise and the overwhelm that maybe like parents are also engaging with.

Sarah Boyd: Yeah. So I think social media has, ma has been a big thing. It's been of benefit. You can learn now multiple different things about children, but I do think it has increased decision making fatigue cognitively for parents because you're just seeing so much information. Many times from people who don't have the same values as you, so you're having to filter it trying to work out if it applies to your child.

If you think about school, if your children are at school, you're having to make multiple decisions. You're getting so many emails. The joke is that it's a part-time job just to keep up with [00:06:00] emails from their school. Then it is just trying to keep up with being an adult and raise healthy, mature children because that in and of itself takes time and attention.

It's not something that we can just automate or put off to the side. And so I think that noise in family life is something that we really do need to pay attention to.

Geoff Holsclaw: To shift a little bit to being practical. 'cause I think most of us are like, yeah, it's so noisy. We're all overstimulated. We know the problem. So let's shift pretty quick the, some of the things we can do. And I love this because you talk quite a bit about self-regulation and co-regulation.

So I wanna spend a little bit of time on that. What do you mean? Could you just explain some of the nervous system stuff that sets the table for that, but then also yeah. And then we'll move into talking about this idea of regulation as being some of the, what do you call maybe the foundation of resilience and emotional health.

So what is some of the kind of nervous system background that we need to understand?

Sarah Boyd: Yeah, so our nervous system has a balance between the parasympathetic nervous system and the [00:07:00] sympathetic nervous system and essem essentially, in simple terms, we are designed to handle stress, so we get stressed, we feel aroused psychologically and physiologically. We hit that stressor and a lot of stuff cascades in the body.

Our, all our senses and our energy goes towards fighting that stressor and in a healthy human and a resilient kind of nervous system, we then balance across into the rest, digest, and calm. Nervous system. And so it is this dance between having all this energy and arousal to hit the stressor and then coming calming down.

Which if you think about hundreds and hundreds of years ago when there was something, big and scary that happened, or an animal was near you and you had to run away, sometimes my children scream at me 'cause they find a spider. It's that kind of oh my goodness, I need to, deal with something.

And then you deal with the stress that, and your whole nervous system. Calms down, and that's a healthy thing. [00:08:00] Sometimes people have an understanding that if I'm gonna be self-regulated, I should never feel emotional, or I should never feel stressed, or I should never feel any of these feelings. That's not true.

There's so much good in that system and the way that God's created us that way. But on the other side, if you are only feeling chronically stressed or chronically aroused and you're not coming back into that balance to the rest and digest, that's where things can become unhealthy or problematic.

And that's where you're not self-regulating. So essentially, self-regulation is your ability to move back and forth between the two. To

Manage your emotions. So being aware of all your feelings, but having control over your responses. And yeah. Do you want me to go into co-regulation as well? I know that's a lot just in self-regulation, so I don't wanna go to.

Geoff Holsclaw: I think about these things all the time, but I What do people, when you start explaining that to parents, like what are some of the questions that [00:09:00] often come up, or what are some of the kind of stumbling blocks to understanding

Sarah Boyd: Yeah. I think for most parents, the lived reality is that you are stressed. And that your children are behaving in a way that you could once makes, you wanna tear your hair out and you have a really big emotional reaction. And so for many parents when they come to our work, what they're looking to do is like, how can I understand my emotions, my self-regulation so that I'm not having these huge emotional.

All the time. And I'm able to calmly set boundaries and connect with my children. And so self-regulation is an important part of parenting and working with children because coming into co-regulation, children are not born with the capacity to self-regulate. This is why babies cry and they wanna be picked up and soothed and calmed.

They actually rely on us because of their brain development to come to that. State of calm. And so essentially, co-regulation is us [00:10:00] sharing our calm or our resilient nervous system with our child. It is us being the mature presence. With our child. And so we see this with mothers, with young babies.

They're, rocking and singing and calming the baby. But I think what's sometimes misunderstood about co-regulation is it's something that's required for children all the way through childhood and adolescence. It peaks during years one to five of a child's life, and it actually peaks again during adolescence.

Obviously, we know that our teens need us. They just need us in a very different way.

Geoff Holsclaw: I want to get back to that teen question I love, that's really important. The way we've talked about a lot on this podcast and in some of the work that Sid and I do is rupture and repair, right? Where you can't protect yourself from the world and sometimes ruptures are just miscommunications. Or just being off with each other, right? But, and then that'll create some level of stress. But then you can repair that and you can and so you're, [00:11:00] the proficiency in moving through that connection or disconnection back into connection, the rupture repair, that's helps regulate what I heard part of what you said has to do with emotions.

'cause I do think sometimes. People think that, oh, being self-regulated means you don't have any more emotions. You've just now flatlined your emotional and that's not true. Could you just explain that a little bit? So what, so if on the one end we're denying emotions, if on the other end emotions just run free and overwhelm us or rule us, like what, how does self-regulation, is that different than both of those and what does that look like?

Sarah Boyd: Yeah, I think, I mean it's a great example because I think it essentially is in the middle. If you deny your emotions and pretend that they aren't there, there's multiple neuroscience studies that show that is one of the worst ways to deal with your emotions. It actually increases the stress response in your brain and body.

And then, so really what self-regulation is with your emotions is having [00:12:00] awareness. It really comes down to an awareness of your emotions. But also in that gap of deciding what you wanna do with them. Because while we want emotions are great signals, they're not, we don't want 'em to control our lives.

So there's something that we wanna pay attention to. There's something that we want in the passenger seat of the car, not in the driver's seat. If you are trying to deny them and push them away, they often have interesting messages to, to tell us about where our boundaries are, what our values are, what we care about.

God's made us emotional beings, and yet at the same time, if we give that permission to just do whatever we want and just go with our emotions, that's not going to make I. Mature decisions either. And so I think that's where self-regulation comes in. Completely agree with you. I talk about in the book about rupture and repair.

There is no way of being this perfect, always self-regulated, always emotionally mature parent, and the way that we develop health in relationships. Is through rupture and [00:13:00] repair is through, we've done something wrong, we've said something, whatever it is. And having the capacity to take responsibility for that and mend that relationship is what keeps the connection, the fabric of connection with our children.

Geoff Holsclaw: Yeah. Yeah. We say over and over in this podcast that. Raising like secure children or raising emotionally healthy children doesn't mean you've created a perfect environment where they're always feeling loved and always feeling accepted, always feeling supported. Although that's, that'd be great, but actually you feel most secure and connected in relationships where you've regularly experienced the repair, where you have been like, oh, we've been off, but now I can trust your heart and I am.

As well as the actual movements of bringing us back together and those are the relationships that you then can trust that you feel safe in what, ' cause I don't know, as I know a lot about the rupture, repair, or self-regulation in the childhood stage, but what does it look like for teenagers then?

You said there's this new kind of like emotional [00:14:00] co-regulation environment that is needed. You were talking about, like the early childhood stuff, like basically young brains aren't formed and then they learn from mature brains and they've literally become structured in a certain way.

So we're forming the brains. But you said that kind of happens again in teenage years. Could you talk more about that?

Teenage Brain Development and Parental Involvement

Sarah Boyd: Yeah, so 90% of a child's brain development occurs in the first three years of their life. And so that is why we see such a big need in co-regulation, something that happens in puberty, though it's sometimes called the great rewiring of an adolescent's brain. It is probably outside of those first three years puberty.

And the teenage years is one of the greatest brain. Integration stages. It's not so much that their brain hasn't grown now they, it's grown like it needed to in the first three years, but those connections are happening in teens. So the prefrontal cortex, which is the [00:15:00] part of our brain that makes us a healthy, mature.

It's the part that runs our decision making, our emotional self-regulation, our stops us from saying everything we wanna say. That is the slowest part of the brain to develop. It reaches some maturity early in childhood. It only reaches foundational maturity at 12 years old. And then it doesn't complete maturity until young adulthood into 18 to 25.

And so that is why teens, they are like. They are in this stage between childhood and adulthood. And part of the problem is if you are an engaged parent and you're still engaging in that rupture and repair and that connection, then that's great. That's all you need to do. Part of what happens though with teens is they do this awesome thing where they push us away and tell us that they don't need us over and over again.

And if parents believe that and they stop. Being available to teens basically what happens is teens then, where do [00:16:00] they go to work out how to be an adult and they end up going to their peers. And so really it is about parents ignoring and not in a way to be intrusive and, not allow them to have their own space.

But not assuming that they're all grown up now and they don't need you anymore, like they would when they were an adult. They're fully self capable. They still need you. And so they're gonna show all the behaviors out there that they, oh, you're so annoying, you're so uncool. You wear all the wrong clothes.

You, you do all that sort of stuff, but they still desperately want your approval. They still desperately want your time and attention. They still desperately want. They're learning to be an adult from looking at you, and so I just encourage parents stay involved. The rupture and repair doesn't look, significantly different than it did when they were eight years old.

It still just looks like everyone owning their own things, but it is just important that we stay involved in our teens world.

Geoff Holsclaw: Yeah, we found, we just launched our two older sons off into the world. But we found in those [00:17:00] teenage years that rupture repair would especially happen just as us old adults were ready for bed, but now they're like tired and maybe their defense mechanisms are down a little bit and maybe they're, they're ruminating on something and then all of a sudden they want to talk for an

And it's like I, I was ready for, I was ready to go to bed, but Right. So just being available to lend your mature brain and the encouragement. I just wanna encourage other parents who are like, I don't feel that mature myself, but you as you do that with your kids, you're building your own maturity too.

And so there is this two-way thing I felt, my wife and I felt oh yeah, we were re-parenting ourselves as we were trying to parent our children as best as possible. So there's definitely. There's definitely hope and growth for all of us. Could you talk a little bit about like attachments and growing healthy attachments and connections.

Could you just talk a little bit more about that at whatever age you think is important for growing resilient children?

Sarah Boyd: Yeah, so the attachment relationship, I'm speaking to the experts, but the attachment relationship is really what [00:18:00] forms resilience in children. So the research shows that the number one predictor of a child's mental and emotional health as an adult is there is did they have a connected relationship with a healthy adult.

Not a perfect adult, just a healthy adult. And a healthy adult is one that does RUP rupture and repair. And so really that relationship is I talk a lot about children and adolescents both need strong boundaries and they need deep connection. And the problem is if they just have, we have it.

A society at the moment that, wants sometimes says that, they don't need boundaries. They do need boundaries. They do not know how to be an adult. But also if we just give boundaries and we don't have that connection and we are not doing that kind of emotional or relational work.

They don't grow in that mental and emotional health because that's what we do. We normalize emotions. If you've ever sat down on the floor with a 7-year-old who's had a hard day at school, who's saying, mom, dad [00:19:00] I feel silly 'cause this person teased me. Even just you being able to say. I felt like that, that too, or that happened to me and it just normalizes their experience.

Or when they're a teen and they're scared to ask a girl out that, or a young adult that they ask a girl on a date and they assume they could assume, or that nervousness is a sign. I shouldn't do it. It's having relationships where you can talk about the normal human experience with no shame and just learn along the way.

And that's really the benefit of what attachment does. And it also. I love the name of your podcast, attaching to God and all the work that you do, because there is no way to have perfect attachment outside of the only one that's perfect is God. And so we are learning all the time to be in that attached relationship, but that's part of what we are suppose imitating when we are trying in our best to do that with our children.

Geoff Holsclaw: Yeah. Could you speak a little bit more then about that? Like what might attaching to God or s spirituality or this idea of wrestling with [00:20:00] God, how does that function like fit into some of these things that we've been talking about? I,

Sarah Boyd: Yeah. I believe that parenthood is one of the greatest invitations that we have to grow in emotional and spiritual maturity. Not everyone takes that invitation. I'm not saying that it automatically makes you grow, but in no other life situation is it endless, sleepless. You are at your end. And in no other situation do you feel this level of love and responsibility and just like you said before, no one, we don't become parents and instantly become emotionally mature.

It's that acceptance of responsibility, emotional maturity is. Developed. It starts with an acceptance of our reality and thinking through how can we grow, how can we do the best with where we are at the moment? And it's a growth journey over time, but I think that's the beauty of what God's created in the [00:21:00] generations.

When Paul talks about, in one Corinthians, you have many guardians, but not many fathers imitate me. And then later in the chapters he says, as I imitate Christ. I love that picture of growth into spiritual maturity because A, it requires our dependence upon God because, in no other situations I know for myself personally, am I constantly just sending up prayers to God of I dunno what to do here.

Please help me, and all of those things. So it, it increases our dependence. But it also grows us in our own spiritual and emotional maturity so that we can be a gift to the other people around us. And I think in this age, I think about that verse a lot because in this age of so much social media and so many people sharing information, which is great in some situations.

What we are potentially losing or not paying enough attention to is having those real life relationships where we can say, imitate me as I imitate [00:22:00] Christ in my life. As I'm growing, as I'm stretching towards spiritual and emotional maturity, I.

Geoff Holsclaw: Yeah. And that maturity is not just it's not information, but it's not just information, right? It's this, the person's whole way of being their facial and body expressions. How do they react? Themselves to stressful situations. How do they model? So it's all those things that you just need that embodied presence.

Let's move then to just like some real practical things.

The Importance of Play and Joy

Geoff Holsclaw: You end the book by talking about some practices and we can't cover them all. But why don't we start with my favorite, which is Making more Room for play. Why is that kind of an essential practice for turning down the noise and turning up the connection?

Sarah Boyd: Yeah. So play and joy is not something you typically think about with resilience. Most people think about just pushing through or maybe just having some rest. But joy is I. It actually bolsters resilience. So creating space to do things that you love [00:23:00] and to enjoy. So play is different than just entertainment.

Entertainment's not bad but it's very passive play is something that you are engaged in. It is any activity that you lose track of time and you get into that flow state. And we see it in young children when they're playing with their toys and they're in their imaginary world.

But I think sometimes we think as we grow, our teens don't need it as much or we definitely don't need it as adults, but that's not true. I love, there's a I quote a play expert Dr. Stewart Brown in the book, and he says that the opposite of play is not work. It's depression. ' cause when we void joy from our life, we void our energy, our creativity, our essentially energy to go through hard things.

Because most of the hard things that we go through are not completed in a day. That would be amazing if they were. But from a nervous system perspective going through stress [00:24:00] and then getting to sleep at the end, excuse me. If it's short term, that strategy of pushing through, gritting your teeth and clenching your knuckles, that works.

But for most of the challenging situations that we go through, whether it's, walking through grief, whether it's walking through a challenging situation with a relationship or at work, they are days, weeks, months, sometimes years. And so we cannot use that strategy of just push through. What we actually need to do is allow ourselves to breathe and create space, and I would say.

Personally, it's the thing that I have to look at the most because it's one of the first things to go when I get busy and stressed. It is the first thing I take off my calendar naturally. I just think, oh, I don't have time for that. I need to go and be productive because that's the other thing about play, it seems like it serves no purpose.

And our society has become so obsessed with productivity and outcome and [00:25:00] achievement that we feel like we're wasting time if we do something that doesn't seem to lead to an outcome. But if I can reframe that for people who may be a type like myself, it does have an outcome. It has an outcome of bolstering that energy and internal reserves again.

Geoff Holsclaw: That's so important. Thank you so much for highlighting that because I think a lot of people think that, good parenting is to re reduce stress especially with kids or something like that. But the research has actually found that kids need not just stress reduction, but like joy amplification.

Like you actually need to. Join with them. And this is why I like kids. When they come back from school or from church, they wanna show you their thing. Not so much just because they're so proud of the thing they made, but they actually wanna see you be excited with them, which makes them more excited, which makes you more excited, right?

Even like with small infants that playing peekaboo you're actually like amplifying joy in this. And I so thank you for highlighting that 'cause that's so [00:26:00] important. And that's like the first practice. Everybody take note. Self-directed, unstructured play at all ages. But we have found, just talk about teenagers too.

Like we, we were really intentional at having game nights, board game nights, finding games to play with our kids that they would wanna play with us, and then making that a real big priority. My kids and I I still, they're like in their twenties and I'll still buy them every once in a while, a Lego set for Christmas, and then we will like, just build it together, just because.

Sarah Boyd: I love that you do that though, because we know in childhood that actually that free playtime, and I love how you talk about the amplifying joy. That's actually how they decompress from their day is that free play. They're actually learning and their brains are rewiring through that playtime.

And also when you get to teens and adulthood, those fun things are what build connections in relationships. So if you've just parented the whole way through your adolescence life with just, giving lectures and boundaries you, there, there is no, none of that fun or relationship there and those sort of things that [00:27:00] you do as a family, whether it's board games or the fun, quirky things that you guys love as a family, that's what makes teens feel connected and grow in relationship with you.

So I love that.

Geoff Holsclaw: And. And it's great for your kids to be like involved with sports or theater and like those activities, but those activities and spending time and taking the is not the same as playtime. So what, tell us about rest.

Slowing Down and Simplifying Life

Geoff Holsclaw: Tell us about slowing down and having a different pace of life. How is that so important for growing emotionally healthy and resilient families and children?

Sarah Boyd: Yeah, so one of the practices I talk about in the book is slowing. Is intentionally slowing ourselves at certain points in our life. And I say this as a chronic person who likes speeding along. I'm always, I keep to the speed limit, I promise in my driving, but I'm always someone who wants to go faster.

It's just my natural rhythm. But it's not actually, if we stay at that pace of rushing or hurrying, it's not the pace of love and [00:28:00] connection and presence. Because really what we need to do is have times where we pay attention. So I'm not at all suggesting that we. Always be slow or we're always, but I think it's important that families take a look at how you mentioned before, the commitment to extracurricular things.

They're good. Until it gets to a point where you feel like your family is never connecting and they're just rushing all the time. And that's where you need to take stock. There are many things that we can do. I think young children give us the gift of slowing down. So do when we're in the presence of people who are elderly they have a different cadence with the way that they live their life.

And when we actually slow down, that's where we can pay attention and see God in beauty, in wonder. And it actually helps us to connect. And so there's some intentional practices I talk about in the book where you can slow yourself down on purpose. Like I do for myself sometimes I force myself to drive in the slow lane.

I force [00:29:00] myself to walk somewhere, right?

Geoff Holsclaw: I could never do that. I could never ever do that. Oh my gosh.

Sarah Boyd: It could be that you have, one afternoon a week, or it doesn't have to be every day where you are just intentionally just slowing the cadence of your life down. Because what that does is it helps you pay. When we get into rush and we get into hurry, we miss things. We miss relationship. Bids for attention we can miss where God might be speaking to us.

And again, it's not about being unrealistic in the world we live today, but it is about having times where we do intentionally slow down in order to pay attention.

Geoff Holsclaw: Yeah. There's so many more, but let's just do this last one before we conclude. You talk about simplifying, how do you de stimulate a house, your home as a way of turning down the noise. What are some practical things that people can do just to change their environment, their literal environment?

Sarah Boyd: Yeah. Clutter is a huge thing that every time, what we don't sometimes don't pay [00:30:00] enough attention to is neurologically every item. All piece of information we receive, our brain is having to use energy to filter and to decide what to do with it. And so the more pieces of information, for example, you have in your home, your brain is having to filter and decide, and that's energy.

And so if you have a collection of something or it's something like that's important and brings you joy, that's different to just the insane amount of clutter. That we have in our houses now. We have bigger houses than we've ever had and more things in it than we've ever had. There are some studies that suggest that it impacts cortisol levels, particularly with women.

So that cortisol is the stress that I am not suggesting in the book that you have to live in a minimalist house, but to consider whether the clutter is aiding your life, your stress, your resilience, your connection with your family, or whether it's got to a point where it's out of control.

And for some [00:31:00] people they really thrive in more minimalistic environments. So this can be as simple as toys are a huge one. It's really difficult with children. They get toys and little knickknacks at almost everywhere they go Now, but it is having some sort of system in your home for cleaning up.

One of the questions we talk about in the book is, if you were to put everything away, is there a place for everything? Not saying that family life always has everything away, but is there a place and having times where you do go through and get rid of a lot of stuff as a way of just releasing the need to be filtering and making decisions on those things.

Geoff Holsclaw: Yeah, and that's, practically, kids are always in a messy bedroom, and it's a huge hassle to have them clean it up. But then when you do and they sit down on the bed, they just feel at peace. And there's there's a reason for that. It's not just the sense of accomplishment, but there's just oh yeah, it does feel nice when everything, it's just like in its place.

And, 

Sarah Boyd: [00:32:00] Children only need, if you actually clear an entire space. Most of the time they only play with about six or seven toys. This has been found in research, but the average child has over 300 toys. And so sometimes, I speak to parents and they're like, my child doesn't, I've got all this stuff and my child doesn't.

Play and sometimes, and we don't think about, Hey, take it all away and just get out one or two things for them and the child will be engrossed for hours sometimes. And so it is that thing of decision fatigue of like, how many things do they have? And they don't have that space to play. So I love what you shared.

Geoff Holsclaw: What you just said brought to mind that idea of, a lot of times the most fun play is to play with something in a different way than it was intended for. And so if you minimize the options so that they're not just distracted one thing to another, and now you have a messy room. If you're just like this is like your only three toys, if you don't like the way they play.

Make up a new way. And kids are really good at that. Just give 'em a spatula. This is your toy for the day, they're [00:33:00] gonna figure it out.

Sarah Boyd: So true.

Geoff Holsclaw: They're gonna do something. Thank you so much. 

Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Geoff Holsclaw: There's so much more that we could probably keep doing. The book again is called Turn Down the Noise, A Practical Guide to Building An Emotionally Healthy Family in a Chronically overstimulated World.

That whole subtitle's that's all of us, that's our desires and our situation. But thank you. Where can people find the. Things you're doing and keep up with keep up with you.

Sarah Boyd: Yeah. Thank you. All my work is on you can see it on websites or Instagram at Resilient, resilient little hearts, or just at my own website, Sarah Boyd.

Geoff Holsclaw: All right, good. That'll be in the show notes. Thank you so much. It's been a delight and it's been so fun. I'll be throwing through this book and recommending it to, to many people. Thank you so much for the time you took to to write it.

Sarah Boyd: Oh, thank you so much, Geoff. I've really loved this conversation. I. 

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