This is my child too! I have some success with large redirection in the imaginative play. So if the lion is supposed to be eating food and I’m doing it “wrong” the all of a sudden I may find something ridiculous in my food (like…a pool noodle!) and is super yucky and I have to spit it out and run away! Getting some giggles in can help. The downside is then you have to repeat the pretend eating a pool noodle 50x.
@Meowkins Pro tip: be the sick or injured lion in pretend play as much as possible. You get to lie on the ground. Child runs back and forth attending to you. You can request serious or ridiculous things (I’m so tired but the ground is too hard! I need a pillow! Or I have a wound on my knee! Quick, get that box over there and we can look for bandages!)
You can also combine other interests. Lion might get norovirus and needs clear fluids. Maybe you are a Lion from Mexico and only roar in Spanish.
ETA rarely I can get away with combining my own desires/chores into pretend play. The Lions are on the hunt, they haven’t eaten in days! They need to…find all the ingredients to make dinner so they don’t starve on the savannah!
My nugget-type object’s inner cushion is covered by some waterproof later because i paid for the optional extra inner cover and it has made everything very easy to wash and clean. We’ve had a variety of fluids and solids washed off it and the foam is fine.
Its completely fine and noiseless. Both layers of cover are very firm but still easy to put on, with the caveat that I dont have a nugget-brand couch. I would guess they’re very similar quality. I have slept on it many times and Pumpkin uses it as her bed.
Recently, Meowlet told me he didn’t like a video on Mandarin because “it felt like school.” He didn’t respond on what about the video felt like school, but I could see plainly that the spokesperson was taking a teacher role. Another thing she did was ask a lot of questions. I think to Meowlet, questions are threatening. That “I’m put on the spot” kind of feeling.
Um, I don’t know where I was going with that. Maybe this. One of my strengths as a person is my love of learning. That’s primarily how I want to bond and an element of parenthood that I really love. But I am worried that I’m bringing too much of the learning in and what if i make him hate learning? What if he hates it already? What if it’s not really his cup of tea and I’m misundestanding him?
This is one we actively struggle with with Latte. She loves KNOWLEDGE. But she wants what she wants, on her terms, without any of the “common” approaches- no asking “what do you know about X already”, no quizzing, no flash cards. If I want to draw something out for her, it’ll be accepted 1000x better if it’s drawn in dirt than on paper. She loves books and has acquired quite a little knowledge base for herself on her own terms, I just have to accept that I’m basically doing an unschooling approach at home with her because she’ll reject anything else. I think reading some Peter Grey stuff helped me figure out how to roll with the punches a little better with her.
Have you run into the PDA profile before? Persistent Demand Avoidance? I also found reading about that really useful when a friend with a PDA kiddo was like “yeah so about Latte…” I’m not sold on whether she fits that yet, but it’s been a helpful tool anyway, too. Especially moving to seeing her ability to have demands put on her is like the Spoon Theory model. She doesn’t have many spoons for demands, and if I’ve used them up trying to convince her we have to wash our hands after pooping, then I’m going to have a very hard time trying to push her to do anything else she doesn’t wanna do that day
I think the differentiator is when the demand they want, internal demands and internal demands they want are all affected. But it’s a newer model etc! And the ideas work for all.
I think play based learning is supposed to be the developmentally appropriate way, so it makes sense to only want fun learning!
Pls remind me of the fun way to learn about hygiene . (It’s bacteria. And roman sewers. And the fact that hygiene milestones are their own thing and can’t be simultaneous with other things for us)
I’ll let you know if I find one at this point the best we’ve been able to do is letting her pick hand sanitizer if she’s resistant, pick which sink to use, and then we made it our hill to die on at the expense of other stuff for about a week while it became more of a habit. We included a little jingle that we asked if she wanted to hear.
Thank you for the recommendation. I read Playful Parenting by Lawrence Cohen and it has been one of the best books for creating a connection and communicating with Meowlet far and away. I will add this to my list.
Ah yes, PDA. It is very common and not even yet officially diagnosed in most autistic circles! I’ve been suspecting based on Meowlets dreamy withdrawal, and it was actually really helpful to understand what was going on. There’s a cute reframe in neuroaffirming circles “Pervasive Drive for Autonomy” which I really like because it captures Meowlet to a tee. He has major gross motor delays and some other challenges but is still functionally a 6YR old for all self-care tasks. I just know when he gets OT that that drive is going to make him soar. (Also @flan PDA profile made me think of some jokes you’ve made so you can now tell people it’s just a brain phenotype and leave you alone LMAO. Always seeking evidence based reasons for justifying my personal misanthropy anyway)
I recently bought Low Demand Parenting which also seems promising.
Thanks for this reminder! Really been trying to prep him for kindergarten but idk. Who cares I guess. Cross that bridge then?
We’re also ditching our table. HEAR ME OUT. He hates sitting at it and its going anyway in the move. Thinking a foldout low chabudai type table that we can move out of the way for playtime. He can sit on his butt or wiggle around as needed without climbing over everything/knocking his chair down.
Is it not obsessively making canva worksheets?!?!?!
. (It’s bacteria. And roman sewers. And the fact that hygiene milestones are their own thing and can’t be simultaneous with other things for us)
