What does/did your 5yo ds play with?

[mamabella]

My ds is 5, we have an 18m dd and another on the way due in July and I am really struggling with getting him to play. I try to limit tv to less than an hour a day, we do family movie night once a week on Fridays, and we don't own video games. He does get to earn 30 mins of computer time (like jump start PC stuff) if he does chores or plays gently with his sister (part of a chart we are trying out) but I feel like he just cannot engage in any activities alone. I am starting to wonder if its his temperment, or we don't have the right stuff for him to do, or this is my fault somehow (isn't it always? ) - I mean I am pregnant and still exhausted and have HG (really bad nausea requiring meds) at 20 weeks still.

Most of the time he is chasing around his sister trying to get her to react to him and whatever he is doing (i.e. making silly faces, playing with her toys in front of her, making annoying sounds, etc.). He will not engage in imaginative play (i.e. make believe, pretend, etc.) no matter how hard I try. He has a wooden castle, dinosaurs, knights, animal figurines, play kitchen, cash register, wooden pirate ship with pirates, wooden firehouse with a ton of wooden furniture and firemen and a fire truck...ALL of this stuff gets NO use with him because he thinks its boring. We don't have action figures because he doesn't understand what they are since we don't watch batman, transformers, etc. He is fascinated by the way things work and will sit there and watch me build something for him (like something from legos, trio blocks, wooden blocks, train tracks, cardboard tubes into a marble run, etc. but he will not participate in the building process and as soon as I stop building he says he is done and won't try to do anything because he can't do it.

In his ideal world I would sit around all day and play games with him (i.e. rummy, old maid, cosmic wimpout, jenga, etc.) or read him workbook instructions from his kindergarten workbooks (but it takes him less than 10 seconds to do a workbook page and about a minute for me to read the instructions). I just can't do these things all day with him.

Am I missing something? Should I have some other realm of magical toys for him than I do? Should I practice benevolent neglect and hope that he comes up with something imaginative if I ignore him long enough? I am going nuts because he follows me around all day moping and asking me what he can do (or getting himself into trouble by bothering other people to get negative attention) and just. won't. play. Anything I offer (painting, coloring, etc.) that could be independent he turns into a drawn out process of asking me a million senseless questions just to get me to pay 100% attention to him and nothing else.

By the way - I do give him a ton of attention - even outside the negative attention he elicits all day - I am on the floor playing with the kids most of the day. I spend my dd's naptimes usually doing something with ds. We also live in a lake community and we spend a lot of time when the weather is not treacherous outside and he loves that too. I try to do things together with my dd and ds too (like painting and coloring and reading) and he just usually complains that he doesn't like my ideas and goes on to suggest something that is totally unrealistic for me to do while still providing supervision for my daughter.

So sorry for the long post - any ideas out there for one tired pregnant mama?

[hakeber]

DS has those wooden train tracks and the woodem Thomas The Tank engines. He has a gazillion different kinds of track, and he used to insist I played with him, but he was so bossy, his dad and I went on a labor union strike, so he had to do it alone. We made sure to make a HUGE deal out of his track formations, and he does it alone now.

He also rides his bike outside for about an hour or two each day, up and down our block and in the playground next door with other kids. He likes to catch frogs and butterflies out by the stream out back.

He will draw in his room for the longest time.

When all else fails and I need him to entertain himself we let him play boowakwala or starfall for an hour or two or watch a DVD like They Might Be Giants, Here Comes Science. It's educational and he likes it and it means I can get something done, like make dinner or mark exams.

[Peacemamalove]

When my son was five he loved play with wooden blocks with toy cars . I think a lot of it had to do with the way we displayed our toy area and how things were presented to him. We got lots of baskets and filled them with cool things from nature and he totally loved it.

[zannster]

We have the same problem - except that there's no toddler to play with. DS has building materials (Legos, Trio, blocks and others), and he's the same way - he won't do much by himself. Sometimes he wants to get his Brio train out, but he still prefers that someone else to play with him. On his own, it might last 10 minutes. He has a lot of games that he likes, but of course, those require someone else to play (although occasionally he will sit near me and play both pieces as if I'm playing). Unfortunately, I have let him watch a lot of DVDs over the past few years, and we own quite a collection. He's also watched movies on my computer. We don't have a TV, but you couldn't tell in terms of the number of hours spent watching something. I've also let him play computer games at times, and he will happily spend hours doing so if left to it - but I'm trying to cut back on that. When he was younger, he liked to do puzzles, even by himself. He'd do the same puzzles over and over. Now - not so much, and he again requires me there with him. He also just got a bunch of pirate ship Playmobil stuff for Christmas, and he can't seem to get into that either. He likes activity books too, as long as I'm reading the stuff to him. (Hmm, our boys sound so much alike!)

On the infrequent occasions where he actually does something on his own (that doesn't involve a computer or DVD player), he looks at books, writes, draws/colors, or plays games on his Leapster. He also likes to play outside if there are other kids to play with. All the neighbor kids are older than him (and not the best influence!), so I feel as though I have to intermittently supervise. Often he can't do what they're doing (shooting baskets, for instance), so he just watches and rides his trike around.

Sometimes I wonder if I need to totally cut him off the electronic entertainment for a while - but I'm not sure if it would do any good in terms of making him self-entertain. Plus *I* spend a fair amount of time online, so I'd have to cut back as well. LOL

[musikat]

That's a tough one. It sounds like the problem is not the toys (you have all the major ones, from what you listed) but that he is just a kid who doesn't like to play alone. Does he have friends that he could have playdates with once a week or so? Maybe seeing a friend interested in a particular toy might spark his interest to explore it on his own?

My oldest (now 8) was really into dinosaurs at that age, and pirates, etc.

My middle DS (just turned 6) is a Lego and building nut. He has been since age 3 and can spend hours building Legos. Is your son good at following directions? Do you have the Lego sets or just the open-ended bucket? I ask because if it is just the open-ended bricks maybe he can't conceptualize what to do with them. Maybe a simple 5+ or 6+ set from the City Legos or Toy Story (or whatever interests him) would work better? My son will sit and put together Lego sets for hours, but he has had lots of practice. Once they are built they inevitably give him ideas of what he could do with them and he modifies them and makes new things out of them. Just a thought...

You mentioned you don't have action figures, and I can see if you didn't know who they were that they might not be interesting. But I will say that my son is mechanically inclined and loves to see how things are built loves his transformers. You really don't have to know a thing about the movie or cartoon. They are just cool vehicles that turn into figures and back again. Pretty neat for that age.

He also loves Bakugan balls -- also something you don't need to watch or play the game to enjoy.

Good luck!

[briome]

I second having another 5 yr old coming over to pay. I babysit one of his freinds on Fridays and I try to have other people lined up all week to fill in that play need (my son also does not like to play alone and I am 34 wk pregnant and not really that active if you know what I mean)

[lisalulu]

My 5yo is obsessed with Legos. But the thing I've noticed is that he still needs direction on them. I can't give him a his bin of legos and have him build something. He likes having instructions with pictures of an end goal. He has several sets that he has instructions from or I will download instructions from their website for different ones for him to work on. The one thing I try to avoid is allowing him to go onto the lego website because its just ad after ad for more toys, games, etc. But most of the directions you can get in pdf and just save to the computer.

Apart from that he's really into interacting with other kids. I get a real sense of boredom from him when its not a preschool day. He loves playing tag and hide and seek and its rough when you're pg!

[4evermom]

My ds was like that, too. He loved the computer but the reason was that it was more interactive than other things, not that using the computer somehow made him unable to play independantly. He always had a high need for interaction. He uses the computer when he doesn't have anyone to play with and happily plays with other kids or adults when they are available. He will build with legos on his own, now. At 5, that was something he liked me or dh to do with him. We'd help him find the pieces he wanted or fit together anything he found tricky. The other thing he would do on his own more often than other things was mixing up concoctions. I'd set him up with baking soda and vinegar at the bathroom sink and let him make a mess. He would keep calling me over to show me things, though. Parenting him has been like a game of ping pong ball, no sustained break. It slowly got better after hitting age 6.

[hakeber]

Originally Posted by musikat

You mentioned you don't have action figures, and I can see if you didn't know who they were that they might not be interesting. But I will say that my son is mechanically inclined and loves to see how things are built loves his transformers. You really don't have to know a thing about the movie or cartoon. They are just cool vehicles that turn into figures and back again. Pretty neat for that age.

Yeah, actually I think the toy came before the show in this case...I think. But ds has never seen the show or the film and he adores these.

[Cujobunny]

My 5yo ds can read, and has been for about a year so he does that mostly.

He also loves his marble run. I have to build it for him but he will play with it for a long time after. Same goes for his Hot Wheels Track (it has battery powered motors that shoot the cars around it). That gets plenty of play.

He has a child's digital camera which he LOVES and it has games on it- tic tac toe and a puzzle game that mixes up the pics on the camera and he has to put them back together, he loves those. Even regular puzzles he will do too for quite a while. He also has a little learning laptop that has games and puzzles on it, he likes that quite a bit. You can see though that I'm soooo not anti electronic toys

He does do a lot of imaginative play but it is a fairly new development for him, and he just turned 5. Funny story - he was in his room playing alone and came out to tell me that he had been pretending to type on a computer but it was one without a screen, instead it had a piece of paper that you put in the top and when you type the letters come right out on the paper(!!!) He was describing a typewriter

[redpajama]

My 5-year-old loves legos, puzzles, mazes and some star wars action figures he has. He's playing with play-doh right now, but mostly to humor his 3-year-old sister who LOVES play-doh and has been asking him to play with her with it for days. He loves games, but he needs someone to play with him--his 3-year-old sister is often able, but I assume an 18-month-old would not be.

He's not into art, but many kids his age would be, so you might try stocking up on good art supplies. My kids LOVE oil pastels--we have some Crayola ones that were relatively inexpensive.

And, of course, books. If he isn't reading yet, you can still find some books that he may be able to enjoy independently anyway. My son has a couple DK "Visual Dictionaries" (I think that's what they're called) that he's been enjoying for a couple years. He has a Star Wars one that someone gave us a couple years ago that he could spent 30 minutes flipping through, even as a 3-or-4-year-old. For his birthday, we got him a Lego Star Wars one, and he loves it. The text is still too much for him to read on his own (he's a relatively new reader), but there are so many pictures and it's a pretty big book--it entertains him for quite a while.

A 100-piece puzzle takes my 5-year-old the better part of an hour to complete.

[onyxravnos]

can you throw him outside?

toss him outside with a bucket and a shovel. I bet you he'll find something to entertain himself with.

[bobandjess99]

We have all the "good" stuff that is talked about on here, but you knwo what? my kids LOVE electronics. all the bright plastic, beepy, noisy, electronic games are what my kids enjoy. They'll completely disregard the wooden play kitchen, playsilks, blocks, legos, crayons, etc and play with the computer or handheld games or leapfrog system or whatever forever. I've finally given in, and we have SO much more peace and happiness in the house.

[kristac]

My 5 year olds favorites: Magnatiles, automoblox, race tracks w/ hotwheels cars (we have an old hotwheels figure 8 set, blutrack, road rug, puzzle vehicles, and he builds his own with unit blocks or wrapping paper tubes or couch cushions, etc.) geotrax, connectagons, matchbox megarigs...

Other ideas-
Ed Emberly books have really helped encourage DS to draw by himself.- your DS might enjoy these since he likes workbooks/ directions (there are no word directions- just step by step pictures).
CD player he can work himself with music CD's/ books on tape.
Puzzles
Pattern Blocks
Leap Pad/ Tag/ some sort of book reader?
Games he can play himself- DS really likes rush hour jr right now.

[mamadebug]

Originally Posted by mamabella

He has a wooden castle, dinosaurs, knights, animal figurines, play kitchen, cash register, wooden pirate ship with pirates, wooden firehouse with a ton of wooden furniture and firemen and a fire truck...

Maybe he has outgrown his toys. My DS loved most of the things you listed above when he was 2 and 3 years old, less interested when he was 4 and wouldn't be interested in them at all now. I remember thinking at one point a while back that he was ready to move onto the "big kid" toys. At 5.5 years old, he loved Legos, Magz, Magnatiles and Playmobil (what he loves about the Playmobil stuff is that it is sooo detailed - there are tons of little parts, which drives me a bit crazy....) He can't really follow the directions to build a specific Lego thing, but he enjoys making up his own things -and, really, I think it is better he make his own thing rather than trying to replicate someone else's idea. He also loves music, but felt like his instruments were "for babies". And, it is true - we got all of the musical type things we have when he was a baby and toddler. He played for over an hour with a friends keyboard recently. It just made me think that in a lot of ways, around 5 years old, they jump up a level in their play and interests.

[Anastasiya]

Originally Posted by mamadebug

Maybe he has outgrown his toys. My DS loved most of the things you listed above when he was 2 and 3 years old, less interested when he was 4 and wouldn't be interested in them at all now. I remember thinking at one point a while back that he was ready to move onto the "big kid" toys. At 5.5 years old, he loved Legos, Magz, Magnatiles and Playmobil (what he loves about the Playmobil stuff is that it is sooo detailed - there are tons of little parts, which drives me a bit crazy....)

Yep. This was my thought, too.

Cash registers, play kitchens - those sound too "little" now for a 5 year old. And sorry, but lots of wooden toys lack the fine detail and don't keep an older child interested for very long. They tend to be too basic.

I would look into things like Playmobil, Magnatiles, Legos, Puzzles, etc like this poster (and others) said.

[NicaG]

My ds sounds similar. He seems to be going through a phase where he just can't play by himself, always needs someone else to engage. He is really into superhero play--we don't actually watch much superhero stuff on tv, he just likes the action figures and likes the concept of good guys and bad guys. He also has a Batman costume left over from Halloween, and he likes to put that on sometimes and pretend he is Batman. He builds hideouts for his superheroes out of blocks (we have a set of large cardboard blocks, and lots of wooden blocks). He used to like Playmobil but now is tired of that and is starting to get into Legos. He is showing interest in Star Wars stuff, even though we never watch any of it. I think his friends at preschool talk about it. He loves tv and computer games, and I go back and forth--sometimes I think it's fine, because he likes it so much, and he learns some math concepts from Leapster games. But sometimes I'm just sick of having his head filled up with all this electronic stuff, and I wish we could just get it out of the house.

Ds seems to be in a phase where he needs to direct every aspect of our play together....so he gets annoyed with me if I make my action figures do/say things he hasn't instructed, or if I help build with blocks without asking him exactly where to put everything. I am hoping this phase passes quickly, because it's not much fun for me.

Right now he has very little interest in board games, puzzles, or outdoor play in the yard or on our street (he loves going to the playground).

He loves looking at toy catalogs (Playmobil, Lego) and imagining things he wants for his birthday, etc. I think he likes imagining the possibility of getting toys more than he likes the actual toys.

Have you tried playdates at your house with other 5 year olds? Or maybe hire a teenager to come over and play a couple afternoons a week? It's great to have someone with fresh ideas come and play once in a while.

I have an 18 month old too, and it's really hard right now to devote my full attention to playing with my 5 year old, since my toddler still needs a lot of supervision. My attention is always so divided. As I'm sure you know. Hang in there.

[zinemama]

Originally Posted by mamabella

Should I practice benevolent neglect and hope that he comes up with something imaginative if I ignore him long enough?

Yes, this is exactly what you should do.

It is not "ignoring" a child to expect him to entertain himself. There is really no need to sit on the floor and play all day with our kids. I have never seen that as my job and frankly, can't imagine spending my days like that. It would bore me out of my skull and I'd never be able to get anything done. Plus, as you are experiencing, it would get my kid used to the idea that my purpose in life is to entertain him.

Go about your day. Involve him in your daily work: cooking, laundry sorting, clean-up. Make it clear that you welcome his help in these areas. And of course read to him. But get up off that floor! When he complains about being bored, kindly tell him that this is a problem for him to solve. Believe me, with all those toys around, he will figure it out.

(My kids played with Legos for hours at this age. If you don't have many, it may be time to get more.)

[mamabella]

Holy support mamas! You all rock!

I have so many more ideas now - thank you so much!!!

I think I do need to invest in some basic legos - he got a bunch of small kits for his bday and did them with dh and I but then he just puts them on a shelf and doesn't touch them after they are done. That lego pdf idea is great and i see ideas elsewhere too (like sometimes in magazines and stuff).

He does like his marble run but he is afraid to change the design because he wants his to be just like the one on the box.

He does love puzzles and can do 100 piece ones - I just haven't bought any new ones in a while - I will have to look into that.

He does have two transformers but he won't play with them because he can't figure out how to do them - they are the smaller ones so they might be trickier (?) I dont know. He got a batman playset for his bday but that is going off to consignment because he won't play with it (his sister likes it better but ends up with the batman helmet or an alien arm in her mouth when I am not looking)

I forgot to mention that he is OBSESSED with music (and movies - but mostly for the soundtracks) and he does have a cd player and a ton of cd's and likes to strum his guitar (a cheapy toysrus special) or play his bongos to those or sing and dance. He would probably love a keyboard (he plays with one incessantly at his friend's house) but my mom is a classical musician and I have resisted buying a keyboard until we can save up enough money for a piano.

I have thought a lot about getting a leapster or Tag for him - he LOVES his friends' leapsters and is just learning to read but I couldn't bring myself to commit to one or the other. I wasn't in love with the Tag character book selection and I was afraid that if I brought the leapster in the house that is all he would do....hmm....I guess eventually he would tire of it right?

And finally - a special word - Zinemama - you made my week. Everything you said is what my gut is telling me and then guilt sets in. I think I have already taught him that dh and I's purpose in life is to entertain him. I think I need to post your post on my fridge to read over my morning coffee every day.

[zinemama]

Originally Posted by mamabella

And finally - a special word - Zinemama - you made my week. Everything you said is what my gut is telling me and then guilt sets in. I think I have already taught him that dh and I's purpose in life is to entertain him. I think I need to post your post on my fridge to read over my morning coffee every day.

I live to serve.

P.S. I vote against the Leapster. Electronic entertainment is a slippery slope, especially with a kid who doesn't know how to entertain himself yet. Get it for him and all he's going to want is toys that do it for him. You are right that he will tire of it. And then he will want another electronic toy and down the slope you go.

Legos, really.