Revealing Her Competitive Nature
Lately I've been trying to encourage Miss A to speed up. She has a tendency to dawdle. For real. I've been getting really tired of listening to myself saying "Come on, let's hurry up." "We've got to hurry, we'll be late." Or when I'm really exhausted and fed up giving the dreaded label "You are SO SLOW! Hurry up!!!" and then I feel guilty.
Recently I've tried to motivate her to be faster by making a game out of it. So I try the "See if you can beat Us" game. We have done this when getting into the car and it seems to work rather well. The other day I tried it when we were getting dressed. I challenged her to see if she could get her clothes on faster than I could dress Baby B. It took her a little while to get on board with this but once she did she was delighted with the idea of being 'the fastest'. Until she noticed that we had quite a head start. It was at this point that she fell to the floor in a heap and began to sulk.
I wondered how her excitement had turned to despair. And then I realized she quit because she thought she stood no chance of winning. Therefore she didn't even want to try.
I have to admit that was a big revelation to me about her character. I know that she is a perfectionist even now, at age three. But I wasn't really aware of just how competitive she was until then. And how uninterested she is in being anything other than #1.
I think I have some work cut out for me. Who am I kidding? I know I do.
3 comments:
yeah... good luck with that. I am a little perplexed/over my head with that competitive bit as well.
That is a good idea, I'm going to try that will my daughter :) She is always a challenge to get out the door in the morning but the race she will enjoy.
I've never tried this but I read in a magazine to get them to compete against themselves basically and time them. Even if it's just counting while they do what you're wanting them to. I think the example was cleaning up thier room. So "last time you did this in 30 seconds do you think you can do it faster this time?" Ethan is still too little to understand but it's one of those tricks I'm definitley going to try when the time is right.
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