Just thirding the "full cup of attention" thing. Another thing I've noticed about the cup is that it seems to vary by child and age in terms of what fills each child's cup. Also, what fills a child's need for stimulation and novelty might not fill the child's need for attention. An all day trip to the zoo might not fill the attention cup as much as 30 minutes of Candyland and I think if you are finding that your child just wants more, more, more maybe you just have to experiment to figure out what fills his or her cup more efficiently. For my child, she needs daily outings for stimulation and I get on the floor and play pretend with her for attention and stimulation, but what fills her need for attention up the most quickly and keeps her happiest the longest seems to be physical play like pillow fights. I think it's just trial and error to find out what works best.
I'm not a huge fan of pretend play compared to other activities I could be doing with DD but I still do it because I think it's good for her and usually I end up learning something about her and what she's thinking about while we are playing. During pretend play I try to show DD how to incorporate toys in new ways so that I can feel like I'm teaching her something. My daughter likes to play pretend with dollhouse toys each day so this week we did things like built little castles out of Magna-Tiles for her dolls, made her dolls a swimming pool with construction paper and wooden blocks for the stairs and slide, drew train tracks and other parts of a town on a large piece of newsprint. The dolls took a train to the zoo (a poster of animals in her room) and I was able to do a little teaching "at the zoo" too. Maybe it sounds dumb and still very boring but if I'm finding new ways of showing her something new I'm not as bored and just trying to come up with ways to weave in something new gives me some small goal to focus on.
Last edited by MotherofToddler; 08/09/13 08:36 PM.
