I say this to both boys.  A lot.  “Boys!  Bossy fun is not fun for anyone!”  It is not.  No one likes to be bossed around.  Especially when you are trying to do something fun, like playing.  Both of my boys respond really well to being bossed around.  Gus especially.  (Enter sarcasm here).

The next few weeks we are going to focus on how to work on language development with our children doing the one thing they were born to do:  play.

This is part I.  And this is a hard one.  Are you ready?  Okay, here it is…Do NOT tell your kids how to play.  Do not tell them to put the cow in the pen.  Do not tell them to push the car around the track.  Do not tell them to put the baby to sleep.  I think you get it, so I will stop.

Why?  Good question.  Because like I say a million times a day, bossy fun is not fun for anyone!  When you tell a child how to play, they think they are doing it wrong.  When they think they are doing something wrong, they stop doing it.

Do you think your child only plays with something for a few minutes at a time?  Before you diagnose them with an issue with their attention, go ahead and see what happens when you stop telling them how to play and just comment on what they are doing.  Twenty bucks says they play a lot longer.

So next time you are watching your little one play, think about commenting instead of bossing.  It will be a lot more fun!

Look at how happy these kids are when they are not being bossed around! (Okay, so maybe it is because we took this at Christmas – but this is what not bossed kids look like in general)