Rethinking Toddler Craft Time

As a recovering “all or nothing” thinker I often times need to stop and get some perspective on my ideas/beliefs about things, just to make sure I’m not having a relapse!

Yesterday this came up with my expectations of “craft time” with Hanna. She’s 2 1/2 and I guess in my never ending quest to be the “perfect” mother, I try to plan these awesome things we can do. Well yesterday I was about out of ideas and patience, so I sent out an SOS tweet for ways to entertain her.

I received quite a few replies (thanks @evelynsaenz @inertiarus @sassyword @partyboutique and of course @steveweber with his spongebob suggestion!) I was surprised that many of them involved bowls of stuff and mixing.

Quite frankly, that didn’t seem like much of an activity to me.  But seeing as I was at my wits end I put some mini pasta shells, some beans, popcorn, flour and sesame seeds in small bowls. Gave her a large mixing bowl, a rubber scraper and wooden spoon.

To my surprise, she LOVED it!! She mixed the ingredients all up, stirred and stirred, and then looked at her new “kitchen set” and started filling the pots and pans with her mixture, and began baking cookies and cakes. She was involved in this for over an hour ~ and probably would have lasted longer, but Daddy came in from working outside and completely distracted her!

I was excited that she had a good time, but the rethinking didn’t really start until this morning when I came across this post on The Magical Childhood website.  In this post she talks about how parents look at craft time as a finished product, when most toddlers don’t have the attention span to complete a whole project.

That really hit me.

It really is all about the JOURNEY, and enjoying the process. It’s NOT about the finished product, but about the fun and learning involved in the process. This makes “projects” like she did yesterday make perfect sense. It also makes me a lot less dismissive of project, activity and craft ideas that don’t result in a fantastic “end product”.

With that simple change in thinking my life just got a lot easier! Now that I think about it, I have been dismissing a LOT of ways to entertain my toddler lol.

It’s really interesting how the way I think about things completely influences how I parent. It’s kind of scary but also very liberating since the way I think is about the ONLY I have control over in this world, so it is within my power to change it!