Teaching patience

Sleeping Boy (1824)
Nikifor Krylov

We've been working on teaching Puck patience lately. While he can spend hours absorbed in something he finds interesting, he can also be incredibly impatient when he's waiting for something he wants, or when he doesn't know what comes next in our schedule.*

So we're working on it.

I think some of his impatience comes when he gets bored. He wants to know what we're doing because he can't just sit and be.

So we're working on it.

Some of it comes from not getting the answer he wants when he asks a question, so he repeats the question, hoping we'll give in.

So we're working on that, too.

I've been focusing on giving him one thing to do at a time, and only telling him the very next thing we're doing (shortly before we do it).

We've also explained to him what patience is ("waiting nicely"), and that he needs to slow down and take a breath before he speaks or reacts. When he asks the same question again, we tell him we've already answered that question and we're not going to discuss it anymore.

It's helping, little by little.






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*His favorite question lately is "What are we doing now?"