OMG NAP

[ailbhe]

Emer's asleep so I can switch my other brain on.

Non-judgmental play supervision: How do you go about allowing your children to choose their forms of independent play when you know that they are acting out violent, gender-stereotyped, or other undesirable roles? I don't have time to go into much detail now but am thinking of stuff like Barbie, guns, etc. Some toys give me the screaming abdabs but I also feel I ought to allow them to play with them, so I try to keep out of it and let it go on around me without voicing a judgment, but there again, I'm fairly sure they're not dim enough not to realise when I'm judging my little heart out.

Property: My kids have SO MUCH STUFF and one of the ways Linnea expresses naughtiness is to destroy her own stuff. In general I either confiscate it and mend it or confiscate it and bin it. I do not replace destroyed stuff. There's too much already. What Would LJ Do?

Consequences: Linnea ate the icing off the defrosted cake in a box on the counter this morning. The cake itself is fine, though probably not fit to be given to guests, but I think she has forfeited her right to eat any of it now. Am I a tyrant or is that a reasonable, connected to the event, direct, comprehensible consequence?

Laundry: Do you think small spatters of orange turmeric staining on the front fly area of a pair of brand new beige trousers would be better or worse than small spatters of white marks where I failed to bleach it properly? I need to make this decision soon. I suppose I can always dye them brown...

Comments

[kightp.livejournal.com]

IANA parent and have no advice to give on that front, but wanted to pass on a friend's solution to the Too Much Stuff issue: Once a year, about a month before Christmas, she sat down with her kids and had them choose toys and other belongings they'd outgrown, clean them up, wrap them and give them to the local women's shelter's holiday gift drive. She managed to both make a fun activity out of the choosing/cleaning/wrapping, and an opportunity to introduce her children to the concept of giving to others who have less than they do.

It started with just choosing one or two toys to give away, but kids are naturally soft-hearted ane empathetic; they wound up giving away much more than my friend had hoped they would.

Her kids are now mostly grown, and every one of them has social activist tendencies. (-:

[ailbhe]

We do already get rid of a lot; I guess part of me feels that I'm depriving them because they already have less stuff and less flashy stuff than a lot of their peers, but the quantity astonishes me.