We go through struggles everyday between the 2 boys over things that ‘don’t really matter’. But actually, who am I to say it doesn’t matter? For them as a child, in that stage, maybe it does matter… Or maybe they don’t know how to understand the situation any differently.
So I might:
– label their feelings – eg ‘you are frustrated he won’t give it back to you’ or ‘you had in your mind you were going to sit in that seat..you are disappointed’
– show them how to deal with it – eg ‘do you think you could show him a better way with different pieces, then he might not care about the ones you want?’ or ‘ask him “could we swap chairs?”‘
– OR I might say to Master4 ‘if we went on a holiday to the moon….do you think we’d care about this problem right now?’. Thinking, he usually agrees ‘no we wouldn’t’. So now I can say, ‘if we were on the moon…?’ and if he’s happy to leave it, phew! If not, it probably does matter to him!
Do you go through these struggles over small things with your little ones? How do you deal with it?