Heads up: This post is 14 years old. My thinking may have evolved since then — read it with that in mind.
L has been doing very well at our new apartment, having a child safe, “Yes” environment (a place that you don’t need to constantly say “No” to your children) is one of the best things you can do to help your child (and you)! I used to get upset when L was in my mom’s place, where he was bored with the plastic “one-way” toys. He would dump and throw things everywhere, so we had to constantly follow him around and snatched things out of his hands. This in turn created his habit of throwing things away quickly as we reach our hands out, because he had learned that we were always taking his things away! So then we adults had to move even faster! It was a downward spiral to madness!!
Like I said before, I am inspired by the ideology behind the Reggio Emilia Approach of early childhood education. I knew I wanted to use it but I didn’t think I needed to start until L reaches 2 ~ 3. Because of that, I wasn’t involved with L early on and he was given dumb “one-way” toys, stopped with too many “No’s” during his play, interrupted from his explorations by the helper’s narrations and nagging, trying to “teach him things”. All these poor parenting actions had caused L to lose out on chances to learn and sharpen his concentration through uninterrupted play time.
It’s not too late though, now that we have a good environment, we are playing catch up. Today, he was playing with a used paper towel tube, he knew how too look through it but after he did, he put it on his nose and tried to sniff through it! He quickly found out smelling through it gives no new experience and dropped the tube.
Later, before nap time, he was playing with the pillows and the big new beach ball Sarah had given him, the ball fell to the side of the bed and he put pillows on it and pretended the ball had disappeared! We had done pretend play like this with him before but this was the first time I had seen him do that by himself.
I think because of L’s earlier experience, he has less patience and give up on figuring things out easily. What I’m trying to do now is to give him space for un-disturbed, uninterrupted play. Shut up and observe, don’t narrate to him or try to help him (that’ll just break his concentration), and only engage him when he indicates he wants my attention. I’m not too worried, I already know he can concentrate when he plays with things that interest him, but I would like to get L to learn to listen again!