Does anyone have any strategies for directing a lovely but very dreamy 6 year old DS to ACTUALLY DO THINGS

[Anchovy]

A polite way to put it is that my DS has developed a "rich interior life", LOL.

He is 6 and in year 1. In general terms he is an absolute poppet - bright as a button, very affectionate, funny, very happy. He is also doing well at school - reading fluently, popular, nice group of friends, absolutely loves going to school.

However over the last few months he has become so dreamy that it is very hard to get him to do things sequentially. He has absolutely no sense of urgency whatsoever. When he is supposed to be getting dressed you will find him sitting on the floor with pants, vest and one sock on thinking earnestly about whether Darth Siddius is more evil than Darth Maul. When I asked him to get table mats out yesterday he ran round the kitchen island twice, did a bit of hopping, annoyed his sister, and when I asked him what he was supposed to be doing he had no idea. He has just started at an out of school football club and spends a lot of time bimbling around on the touchline clearly having forgotten what he is supposed to be practising.

Is this just a developmental phase? Is it a boy thing to be such a bubblehead? I know I make it sound funny but it is starting to impact on his school stuff a bit and I think we need a few strategies for getting him to just get a bit more focus rather than this being a slippery slope to Planet Bubble.

Any views?

Am just idly browsing in my lunch hour but had to post...

You know, both my children are like this. The school tear their hair out, I tear my hair out, dh tears his hair out, the nanny tears her hair out and my children continue in their merry way with their heads firmly planted in the clouds.

We are RENOWNED at school. Dd lost her reading diary and found it last week in her school in tray which she, apparently, had not cleared out since OCTOBER (they are supposed to do it every day grr).

Nothing much works with ours. No amount of reminders is ever enough so I have just given up now . I remind, I remind again and then I leave it. I've stopped going back in for lost uniform, I just don't buy any more. They both know they have 3 sweatshirts/cardigans each and then that is it and if they leave them at school, then too bad chum.

I do think they have learned more this way than any other...so if, e.g. they haven't got their gym kit, well then they go to gym without it.

Mine do hear but there are a thousand other things they'd rather be thinking about than boring admin stuff. Unfortunately, both dh and I were like this at school and as adults, I wouldn't say we were that much better (although I am more organised than dh, for sure!).

No, you've all got a clone of my ds (age 6, nearly 7).

This morning at 8.45am

Me: we really have to go now or you will be told off by the head.

DS: but do you think that Darth Maul really has a bouble ended light sabre?

Sigh.

I mean DOUBLE of course! Not that i'm an expert on Darth Maul, .....actually I probably am.

How old are your children FIS? I agree with you, but it feels to me that 6/Year 1 is a bit young for making them take the consequences of their own vagueness. Or maybe I'm just a bit soft! In a way I think I'm trying to head off having to do that by trying to get a grip now.

(I'm LOL'ing to myself because about a year ago I was in the park with the DCs and this woman was saying "Well, Barnaby,(really!) I simply refuse to take the conseqences for your poor life decisions" - Barnaby must have been about 4!)

My 7yo is year 3 and we have been told by the school that at this age it's the child's responsibility and we shouldn't do it all for them. So now I feel quite justified in letting her forget things - which she still does.

On the lost school sweatshirt thing, dd1 used to lose about one a week on average, I kept buying new ones. But eventually I sussed that all you had to do was pinch another unnamed one out of the school lost property box in the expectation that other people have "borrowed" ours.

lol poor Barnaby.

Mine are in yr3 (dd, age 7) and yr1 (ds, age 6).

Tbh, ds (yr1) is better than his sister and if he hasn't done something I've asked, it's normally because he was busy doing something else so CHOSE not to do it (iyswim) so I will say, 'right, last reminder, swimming kit' and he will say 'I KNOW MUM' and will normally get there eventually. He is bad with remembering stuff at school though (uniform, lunch boxes, water bottles) so I am tough on that although the lovely teaching assitant said to me on Friday 'oh Mrs Foxinsocks, how lovely to see you again. I've been through the cloakroom and found all your son's uniform. I remember having to do the same with your daughter. Ahh the Foxinsockses, you know how to keep us busy!' .

Dd is more problematic because the school expect her to remember things now she's a junior and she doesn't. And there are no helpful TAs now. I don't think she once came back with her homework in the last half of the winter term grrr. She just forgets to put it in her book bag, forgets her coat, forgets everything really. Her head is always buried in a book - that's where her mind is all the time, just waiting to read the next page!

THANKYOU THANKYOU THANKYOU MUMSNET

Yet again i read a thread and feel better!

You are all describing my ds1 (age 7) and I am so glad to hear all your stories which are identical to mine.

This morning in the car:

Me: Have you got your homework book?

DS1: No, but if you dropped a light sabre from the top of a tallest crane in the world would it slice into the ground first or just bounce?

Me: GAAAARRRRGGGGHHHHHH

I still haven't worked out where my dd1's mind is - somewhere in the clouds but not with Luke Skywalker or anyone else obvious. If you ask her where her homework book is she's most likely to either not hear you, or say "what homework book?"

But she is quite charming. We did a treasure hunt in the forest on Saturday, dd2 (6) was rushing ahead, always first to find the clue, totally focussed on the competitive side of things, dd1 was lingering along, listening to the sounds the trees made. Sometimes I worry we might edit that side out of her if we focus on achievement or competitive behaviour too much. She could become the world's first great Tree Whisperer.

Aw bless - they are all the same...

Snorks Household on a recent morning:

Me to DS1 (8): "Go and get dressed now while I shower"

(10 mins later) DS still in pyjamas building magnetix tower at right angles on the radiator "ooh Mum, how far out do you think I can build it before gravity gets the better of it"

Me: "Lovely darling - can you get dressed now?"

(5 minutes later) DS is pyjama bottoms lying on bed reading Guinness book of Records, starts telling me about the man who can eat 64 boiled eggs a minute...

Me: "Excellent. Look, we need to leave in 15 minutes - put that book down and get dressed now, OK?"

(5 minutes later) I come back to find DS in just his pants, playing the opening bars to Deep Purple's 'Smoke on the Water'.....

AAAAARRRRGH! If there ARE any solutions, please tell me NOW!

Oh, and another thing... does your DS/DD give you that kind of glazed look when you're asking them to remember/ do something, as if to say, "huh? What IS she going on about?"

ooh Fennel, I must get off here now but dd is exactly the same. She's charming and friendly and wonderful company and completely non competitive (which is MARVELLOUS as her brother is uber competitive) and she'd rather be skipping around than carrying out any sort of task!

She has a teacher this year who doesn't get her at all and after her last parent's evening (horrendous), I got cross with her and she got ever so upset and I felt AWFUL. So I've told her it's all in her hands now and I won't get annoyed but I'm also not going to remind her a zillion times and it does seem to be working a little bit better (homework did come back this weekend, so that's a good start although she hasn't asked for a new page in her reading diary since October ).

The charmingness of the all-out kind of dreamers is (thank goodness) a constant - they are always lovely.

My own ds (currently sporting a bruise (now delicately golden) on his right eyebrow where a lamp-post interrupted some thoughts about Flying-Whales) appears out of his dream every now and then: "Mum ... if you were going to set up a charity, what would you set it up about?" "Mum - if you wanted to go on an adventure holiday, where would you go?"

And my absolute favourite: "Mum .. who is the most understanding person you have ever met?" (A MNer sprang to mind!)

I'm loving the idea of Norma's DS in his pants playing the opening bars to Deep Purple's 'Smoke on the Water' He's going to be a lover, not a fighter, that's for sure!

I don't think that my Dcs school is going to be as tolerant as FIS's sounds. It is a small'ish private one - non-selective and not particularly competitive but you are paying for a reasonable amount of rigour . I have heard that it all gets ratcheted up a bit when they go into Year 3 - which is as it should be - and I really want Ds to be able to have a measure of self reliance by then to be able to cope with it.

Its funny you should say that Bink because my DS is absolutely and truly lovely. He has got the most wonderful nature, is very loving and has a huge capacity to be happy.

(I have a very bright, shouty, focussed DD who is known at home as "the Queen of Mean", who I obviously also adore but is quite different)

my dd1 isn't very chatty but she constantly hums and sings around the place. It's rather pleasing. And she has a strong empathy with animals, she's very caring even of woodlice.

She doesn't do Rigour though.

What I want to know if how they can be comfortable sitting around in their pants and, in the case of my DS, it one arm and his head in his tee-shirt but the other arm, finding itself strangely distracted, not dressed at all. He can sit like that for ages.

Or he will wonder round with one sock on and one off, in just his underpants. How can anything be so interesting that you can't manage to put your second arm in a sleeve or a foot in a sock?!

You see Niecie that is exactly what I'm on about. The idea of losing impetus in a task half way through it: particularly one as basic as putting both arms in a T shirt.

Grrr

Anchovy - it sounds as if we are perhaps one year ahead of you...
DS (8) has just moved to a non-selective, but academic independent school - we hoped the smaller class sizes would help him to , well, focus better .

I'm still a bit stressed about it to be honest, as the transition to Year 3 DOES mean that there is more expected from them, in terms of personal organisation. When we had the first parents evening, his teacher (who is well-respected, and I think pretty good actually) said that he was clearly very capable, but a bit detached and disorganised.
She described how she's noticed him sitting strangely on his chair, adn when she got closer discovered that everything he wasn't using on his desk he had put behind him on his seat for some reason (WTF is that all about then?) so by the end of the lesson couldn't actually SIT on his chair!

I think after we'd had a chat with her she began to understand him a bit better from our point of view, and interestingly her report from last half term is much better, so perhaps they're both getting to know each other better!

I DO worry about him though, I can't imagine how he'll ever be able to leave home and survive!

my dd is four and is exactly the same! only she likes to paint and colour etc. drives me mad and i shout and nag but other than that i am not sure what to advice

Oh, I have those children too - boys aged 9 and 6. DS1 is more dreamy generally, but getting better with age; DS2 is getting worse with age, rather like your DS, Anchovy.

Both have very different but rich interior lives - DS1 is your Star Wars/Jack Sparrow kind of boy, whereas DS2 has numerous baby animal avatars, of which the most recent is Little Fluffster, the baby koala (his puppy incarnation rejected the Egyptian dog collar at the Tutankhamun exhibition as 'too ancient').

We do the Two Word thing, but as a reminder from me ("Coat Shoes", "Teeth Toilet"). But I would appreciate a tool for cutting through wittering.

We sound very like the Foxinsockses, in that DH and I are the same, but I am Much More Organised (from a low base).

Oh God you have all made me feel better - LOLOL at the lightsaber question in the car! I too will be modelling Two Words this week - thanks for that top tip

I forgot my other Dreamer story which I usually trot out.

I went with ds & dd once to listen to Michael Rosen read (which we all loved & ds & dd as usual more riotously enjoyed themselves than anyone else in the room) - then we went afterwards to get a book signed. In the queue, ds became a bit vague so that by the time we reached the top he was not quite on the planet. I apologised, and said "We're a bit dreamy ..."

I got a Beady Look from MR, who said, with some intensity, "DREAMY is GOOD."

Yes, Bink, but I have a strong suspicion that MR doesn't have to get a dreamy 6 year old out of the door to a judo class at 7.45am on Tuesday mornings!

Maybe MR also didn't have to get 3 young children to school this morning, the younger two were ready and waiting and cooperative, oldest, 7yo dreamer, drove me up the wall. Just not getting ready. Constantly and consistently dreaming.
So we were all late. Which isn't really fair on the others.

Dreamers are out of favour in the Fennel household this morning.

I could have written that OP, I think. The only thing is that DS's head is mainly filled with football. Also I think he got significantly worse when he learnt to read and got into reading independently. I think the stuff that he reads really fills his head up, and leaves less space for practical stuff. He is often to be found when he is supposed to be tidying his bedroom stood by the bookcase reading a book that he was actually supposed to be putting away. His 3yo sister is so much more together....