There’s an order I used to have completely the wrong way round.
I’d decide on something, set it up at the table, and then ask my daughter to come and sit down. And on a good day that worked. On the other days the sitting down was the part that fell over, and I’d read that as her not being interested in the activity, when what she wasn’t interested in was the sitting.
Sitting isn’t the start, for everyone
It’s easy to treat sitting down as the neutral position that things begin from. Table, chair, materials, off you go.
For plenty of children it isn’t neutral at all. It’s a demand, and quite a big one, arriving before the interesting part has even started. If they’ve got a body full of unspent afternoon, being asked to park it and concentrate is the hardest thing on the table, and no amount of enthusiasm about what’s on the table changes that.
What I gradually noticed is that if she moved first, even briefly, the sitting stopped being a negotiation. Not because she’d been worn out, which was my first assumption and is not what’s happening. Something else was going on, and it looked more like the body needed its turn before the hands could have theirs.
Short, contained, and no skill required
The thing that made this practical was realising it doesn’t need to be a big production.
Our version is one song. You put it on, you both dance to it, and when it ends it’s over. That’s the whole thing. No space required beyond a bit of floor, nothing to set up, and crucially nothing she can do wrong, which matters because the point isn’t to do it well.
Two or three minutes of that and the same child who couldn’t come to the table five minutes ago will sit down and stay there. I still find it slightly startling.
It’s a sequence, not a fix
I want to be careful about how I put this, because it would be easy to read it as a technique for settling a child down, and that isn’t what I mean.
Nothing here is about getting a child to be quieter or easier. It’s about the order things happen in. Some children arrive at the table ready and some need a couple of minutes of moving before the table makes any sense to them, and the second group aren’t a version of the first group that needs correcting.
If you’ve got one of those, the useful adjustment is on your side rather than theirs. You go second. The activity you had in mind still happens, it just isn’t the first thing.
Reading the order they need
This is really the same instinct as offering a smaller first step to a child who hangs back, just pointing in a different direction. In both cases the activity was fine and the way in needed changing.
Some afternoons she comes straight to the table and I’ve no idea why. Some afternoons we dance to one song about a lorry first. Both of those are the afternoon working, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to stop grading them against each other.