Learning to dress / undress - when & how?

[AngelDog]

For the last few months I've been trying to teach my 2.5 y.o. some dressing & undressing skills and I'm getting increasingly frustrated. I'm 6 months pg and starting to find all the dressing & undressing (with associated bending/crouching) quite hard work, and I'd hoped to get him more independent with this by the time the baby arrives.

Am I trying to push it too soon? He has never shown any real desire to do his own dressing, which is why I started trying to teach him.

DS will cross his arms to lift up a t-shirt, but can rarely manage to remove his arms from it, and can't get it over his head. Occasionally he can get his vest over his head if I remove his arms first, but that's rare.

His head has always been proportionally bigger than his height/weight (which are 99th centile) so getting things over his head is always hard work even for me, even when he wears clothes in the next size up. He refuses to wear button-up shirts.

When it comes to dressing, he can put a loose vest over his head (not a t-shirt) but doesn't seem prepared to try to use two hands to help himself get his arms into the sleeves. He just sticks one arm as far as he can get through the neck hole and then has to ask me to help him get it out again as he's stuck.

He can occasionally have a good go at putting on trousers but struggles to get his legs into separate trouser legs, and he can't pull them up further than his thighs. When undressing he can't manage to pull trousers down over his bottom. He's only recently started to be able to remove socks occasionally - although most of the time he needs an adult to help him get it round the heel.

Any tips to help reduce my levels of frustration - or should I just get on with dressing/undressing him myself and wait till he gets the hang of it on his own?

Can you try making it into a game? I've just taught nearly-three DS to take off his clothes by turning the actions into a Tree-Foo Tom spell and legs into trousers are trains going into tunnels. That kind of thing. Even if it doesn't work, it does make the whole process a bit less stressful and more of a laugh.

I just let DS get to it when he was ready, tbh. In fact, I was quite grateful that he wasn't that adept at stripping off, so I didn't have a suddenly-naked toddler running around, as a friend of mine had to deal with!

In reality, for DS, 2.6 would have been way too young. He's now 4.7 and can dress himself almost completely by himself (I just have to lay his clothes out for him to help him out which way round they go). He's been able to do his bottom half for the last 10m, I'd say - but we had troubles with the top because he would panic if it got even a little bit stuck as it went over his head.

I would say stop being frustrated - he's still pretty young to get the hang of it :) (although all children are different of course)

Thanks, both.

That's pretty much my usual approach to things, Thumbwitch - I generally only try to encourage DS to do things if it's something that irritates me (which this did).

I think I'll leave it for now and get him to help as much as he wants rather than trying to get him to do it. Although this afternoon he did bring me a pair of trousers and ask which was the hole his leg should go in...

I think he's a bit young. My dd is 3.1 now and just lately has really moved into the "I can do it myself !!" phase. At 2.5 she didn't really self identify as a "big girl" like she does now.

In Dd's case her enthusiasm for dressing herself is directly proportional to the freedom she has to choose what to wear she looks like a scarecrow much of the time but she does at least dress herself !

As long as he can do it before starting school, that's all that matters, right?

Like I said, I only started doing it because I'm finding it tough on my back doing all the crouching/bending/sitting to do the dressing & undressing.

DS has been in the 'do it myself' phase about a month - his most frequently-used phrases are "No Mummy do it!" and "DS do it!". But interestingly he doesn't think of himself as a 'big boy' - he describes himself as a baby. :)