Yesterday I shared a bit about what I am doing with Caroline at home regarding learning.  Today I want to ask a question. I’m sure I’m not the only one facing this. What do you do with a child who won’t play by herself and is bored with something within five minutes?

I was sharing with a friend in an email recently that it is so hard to keep Caroline occupied. If I prepare something for her or gather the materials for a new activity, she will generally do it for five minutes tops and then she is done. She isn’t interested in exploring all the different creative ways to use something. She definitely is not into doing something over and over again. Once she’s done it a couple of times, she’s ready to move on.

I don’t have the time or financial ability to find 10 new things for her to do each day. She has plenty of open-ended toys. We rotate toys. We have her put toys away before she goes on to the next thing (mostly – still working on that). She’s not over-sugared. But it is almost as though she needs a steady diet of new things to do and experience all day.

She also isn’t interested in playing alone. At. all. It doesn’t matter if she gets lots of one-on-one time for an hour or two. She still wants to be with us and have us play with her. We can’t play with her all day (and we don’t). But she  isn’t lacking for attention.

A couple mornings a week we have a sitter come for a few hours to play with her just so we can get a break and focus on our work. She loves having the sitters come (two girls who are completely different) and always has a lot of fun.

Anyway, I am open to suggestions. I realize part of it may be her age, part of it is a function of having an only child, and part of it is training her to do things, but it is driving me nuts. The combination of a mom who needs time alone during the day to think, recharge, take care of a home, and work and a child who thinks she needs a play companion all day, every day and seems incapable of getting engrossed in anything by herself is just not working very well. I have to be honest. If things don’t change as she gets a little older, this may be the very thing that trumps everything else and forces us to choose to put her in school. I know she might grow out of it, but right now it is very hard.

(And I won’t even get into the part about the fact that she wakes up at 5:00 every morning and thinks it is time to get up. I am dreading the time change because her internal clock is so strong I don’t even want to think about how this is going to play out shortly. We’ve already tried adjusting her bedtime to start compensating for the change, and that’s not working either. It doesn’t matter what time she goes to bed. She wakes up early every. single. morning.)

So what do you do with a child who won’t play by herself?