So I have a daughter who is the center of my universe. She just recently turned eight years old — or as she currently likes to say, she is 8 1/12 years old — and we have good times and bad. She is (unfortunately) an only child so I have no means of comparison or frame of reference to determine whether some of her behavioral issues are due to "kids will be kids" or else through some shortcoming of mine as a parent, so I'm looking for group wisdom.
Some of the greater challenges that we've been facing:
- Chores. She doesn't have many of them and the ones she does have are pretty lightweight. Her daily chores should take about 20 minutes to complete and her weekend chores should take less than an hour to complete. But the only time she does her chores is if her mother or I stand behind her — sometimes literally — and constantly prod her to keep her on task. She either gets distracted by the littlest thing, or she goes Full-On Grumpy which cuts her speed by about 75%, either of which means her one hour of chores takes 3-4 hours and they're usually done half-assed. Even if I give her an itemized list for every day of the week, she'll often mark things off as "done" when she's barely even started them.
- Classwork and homework. She's doing exceptionally well in her classes; in fact, she's going into the gifted program next year which is pretty cool. But unless she's monitored she tends to rush her handwriting which makes her answers borderline illegible. It's not that she can't write neatly, it's that she just doesn't want to spend the time making it legible. More than once I've had her redo her entire homework project because her answers were incomprehensible. She gets very grumpy when this happens, and we go through this mantra all the time: "If you'd done it neatly the first time then it would have taken you ten minutes. Because you did it messy in five minutes, now you have to spend five minutes erasing and ten minutes rewriting, so your ten minute homework takes you 25 minutes so you have 15 minutes less free time because you did it messy."
- She can't seem to grasp on to repetitive tasks. For example, every (school)day there's the same routine: in the morning it's wake up, go to the bathroom, wash hands, get dressed, brush hair, brush teeth, load up the backpack, and go to school. In the afternoon it's come home, unpack the backpack, go to the bathroom, wash hands, do homework, eat dinner, do chores, then free time until bedtime. At night (bedtime) it's go to the bathroom, wash hands, shower time (every other day), brush teeth, change into pajamas, brush hair, go to bed. We've had this more-or-less same routine since preschool — four years — and she still struggles to remember and do all of it.
- Asking permission for everything. It'll be her free time, for example, and she'll ask me if she can go outside and play. She won't get a napkin or a drink unless she asks for one first. She won't touch the refrigerator or freezer without permission. She rarely goes to the bathroom without asking first. And no matter how many times I tell her, "You can do {x} without asking for permission, you can just do it whenever you want," it never sticks.
- "Casual carelessness." I don't know what else to call it. She'll put her dinner drink on the edge of the table and within seconds she'll (accidentally) knock it onto the floor, then after we clean it up and give her a new drink and remind her that it needs to stay away from the edge, the new drink will be riding the edge of the table before we know it. Or she'll sit all the way back in her chair which causes food to drop off her fork/spoon and onto her lap/floor, so I'll remind her to eat over the table — and two bites later she's right back where she started from. I'll help her clean up her toys and together we'll find places on the shelves/cubbies/etc for everything, then the next time I tell her to clean up her toys she'll just make neat(ish) piles on the floor and act confused and surprised when I point out that her toys need to go onto the shelves/cubbies/etc. And she almost never flushes the toilet when she's done. All of this stuff happens all the time. Whenever it's pointed out to her she just says "oops" and occasionally "sorry" but there's never any lasting change/improvement, and sometimes she laughs like it's so funny that she's forgotten to flush the toilet for the 50th time this month.
All of this stuff aren't new things; some of these things, like the "casual carelessness" issues, have been going on for years.
So is stuff like this common with a child her age(ish)?
Submitted May 26, 2015 at 06:27AM by bubonis http://ift.tt/1Fc9k5R Parenting
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