It dawned on me today that I sometimes rush Simon through activities before he is finished with them and similarly, start pointing out a variety of other things that we can do while he is having fun with an activity that isn't the least bit stressful/bothersome to me (like jumping off the couch in dangerous ways). This is primarily because I sometimes get restless with whatever it is he is doing before he does, or I sometimes just think that we'd have fun doing X or Y instead so I start to offer other things to do. I think this is probably frustrating him (not in the sense of annoying him, but in more subtle ways) -- it certainly sounds like it would be frustrating, not to mention a disservice to him and his growing level of concentration and patience with a given activity. Today I thought of what he is doing in terms of how I am when in the midst of doing something that I enjoy. Even though there are plenty of things that I enjoy, while I'm in the midst of one of them, I'm often far from eager to move on to another enjoyable activity.
Can anyone else think of ways that they have, or sometimes do, accidentally frustrate their little ones? (I mean "frustrate" in a really broad sense of the term and mean for it to refer to anything that might contribute to setting their child slightly off-kilter in one way or another.) I find that when I identify something like this and make the relevant changes, it sometimes makes a really big difference to how smoothly our days go.
Can anyone else think of ways that they have, or sometimes do, accidentally frustrate their little ones? (I mean "frustrate" in a really broad sense of the term and mean for it to refer to anything that might contribute to setting their child slightly off-kilter in one way or another.) I find that when I identify something like this and make the relevant changes, it sometimes makes a really big difference to how smoothly our days go.
