DS wants me to play with him ALL the time.

[TheDancingQueen]

DS (4yrs old) does not seem to like playing by himself at all. He wants me to play with him ALL the time. I do give him the time and play with him. I give him about an hour undivided attention after nursery, and so does DH when he comes home. But when I need to get on with other things like tidying up or starting dinner, he will throw a strop. It's almost like a teenager!

DS has recently started saying it's so boring here and he just lies there on the floor or covers himself up under the blanket rather than to play by himself if I won't play with him. Or he'll start smashing toys and gettng very angry. I've got him plenty of things he can play by himself with but he just wants me or his dad ALL the time. Is this normal? How do I teach him to enjoy time by himself. Please advise me...?

Maybe you can put a little egg-timer in front of him and tell him that once's its up, its play time again. Until then, Mummy must do some work.

I have same problem with ds whose 7. Only this morning he tld me he wanted to spend more time with me! That would be ok but he's been quite poorly (with sickness every day for the last 10wks) and hasn't bn able to go to school so i've done nothing but spend time with him

I love ds to pieces but when you've got a house to run you've can't give undivided attention 24hrs a day unfortunately:(

I always make sure he gets a cuddle every morning and we always have our quiet time on a night before bed when I read to him or we talk about our day and I give him the opportunity to help if i'm busy in the kitchen. We walk to and from school(when he's there) and talk along the way. Sometimes I seen to have a lot of time with him and others I feel guilty because i've been so busy i've felt like I've ignored him.

Think it's the joys of being a parent

Does he have any little friends you could invite for play dates? Once he gets in the way of playing a little bit more with other children, then he might be able to play a little more by himself. Or at least failing that he might get invited back on some other play dates giving yousome free time

I find one of my DC's is like this. What works for us is to make a "plan" after school. Down the side are time slots, eg 4-430 430-500....etc and next to them we write what each person is going to do. I include my jobs such as making tea, vacuuming or whatever and we put in activities we will do together. When I am doing a job, we work out what he will do - it might be "play in bedroom" "Watch tv" etc. He knows that if I don't get to do my jobs in the allocated time slots then he will not get to have the time with me later on.

This works really well for us - when he comes to me bored I can say "look, in 10 minutes, you and I are going to do a puzzle but I ned to get this in the oven first. You are supposed to be making a lego car now, how are you getting on with it?" for example.

It helps because he knows that he will get some time with me and he knows when he will get it.

The other thing I would say is that our 8 year old now doesn't want to do stuff with us - he will go straight to his room and it's a struggle to even get a conversation about his day before he has gone upstairs and closed the door......so make the most of it while he does want your time, as frustrating as it is sometimes.