Factors that might come into play

Your Child’s Mood

Your child’s mood and the time of day is super important when you’re introducing an activity.

Sometimes it’s great to redirect kids that are getting out of control to a more structured activity.

But sometimes, that just causes another breakdown.

And sometimes you don’t want to interrupt your child happily playing (kind of like “never wake a sleeping baby”, never disrupt a happily playing child).

But sometimes this could be the best opportunity to do an activity which could then lead to longer and more happy playing!

It’s hard to know what to do, when to do it.

Your Own Mood

We all get this way at some point: we get grouchy and snap at our kids after a long day.

This is not the time to do an activity.

I know, I know. You want them to do an activity so you get them out of your hair.

But going into an activity with a bad attitude almost always warrants a bad outcome.

Instead, take a deep breath and come back to it when you’re calm.

Your Child’s Age, Development, and Interests

Sometimes the activity “as-is” isn’t suited for where your child is at right now developmentally. And that’s to be expected!

I don’t know a single teacher that teaches a new method of learning something new and every student gets it right the first time out.

We all learn things at different paces and we don’t want to rush that. We want them to love learning and feel the pride in learning something new.

Kids are also all interested in different things… and while you might think this science experiment would be super cool for them to do, they may not enjoy that as much and may be more into playing with their dolls.

This is all really good to know. In Module 1 we built our Foundation and got to learn these things about our kids. We’ll learn later in Module 3 about how to tweak activities to fit your child’s interests and developmental progress.

But right now, just knowing that this all has an effect on the outcome of an activity makes it a lot easier to know that it’s not just you, or the activity, or your child.

How You Can Successfully Invite Your Child to an Activity

Inviting your child to an activity doesn’t have to be anything extravagant. But knowing what your child is into for this part makes it much easier.

Here are a few ways to invite your child to join you:

1. Prep for the activity as normal and just invite them!
2. Include your child in prepping for the activity to get them excited.
3. Prep for the activity and just walk away, leaving everything out for your child to discover. Be excited and surprised when they find it and explore it together.
4. Prep for the activity and just start doing it quietly yourself. If no interest has peaked right away, start talking to yourself about what you’re doing, just loud enough so that your child can hear you.
5. Invite your child to bring whatever it is that they love doing, or are currently playing with, to join the activity with them (Playing with dolls? Maybe they want to do the activity with them! Building blocks? Bring them over and let’s see how we can incorporate them! Pushing around trucks? They can be a part of this too!)

Note: Don’t try all of these for the same activity. And no one way will be the solution for all the activities you try to do. You’ll have to switch it up here and there to keep your kids on their toes.

I can guarantee that after you start getting your child into doing activities, they get used to it, and look forward to this time.

You’ll soon be at a place that they’re asking for activities and you’ll need to have today’s activity ready to go or have a go-to list handy.