Keeping our kids occupied can be one of the hardest things in the world. When it’s a rainy day or your kids are recovering from an illness you have got to find ways to keep them occupied without resorting to a tablet or the TV. So here are a few things for you to try.
Get Them Creating
While a pen and paper might not be incredibly exciting for your child, you can go one step further and give them a digital drawing tablet where they can let their mind wander. This way you don’t have to give them a tablet, but it still feels like one, which can be an amazing way to get the balance right.
Let Them Help You
An amazingly simple thing for kids who are bored is to give them a job they can handle. It doesn’t have to be anything complex. The fact is that if they are just wandering around the house, giving them something to do makes life easier for you. Even just asking them to take out the recycling is an amazing extra bit of help.
Create a Game Box
For those rainy days, having a box full of things that your child can play with by themselves, from puzzles to coloring books and cards, whenever your child needs entertainment, just give them the box. And this might seem like a pretty old-school way to keep a child entertained, but you have to remember that it’s all about persistence. When you give them a game box, they may very well resist at first, but give it time, and they will soon accept it as part of a routine.
Create a Treasure Hunt
One of the best ways to keep them occupied for hours is to hide something like a sticker or a coin somewhere in the house and give them a clue so you can let them run wild trying to find it. The fact is that you may want to make it incredibly difficult, but make it easy for the first and then gradually make it a bit harder to find so you can build up their resilience in the process. It also means that when they are upstairs tearing the house apart, you have a few minutes to yourself!
Create an Idea Box
One of the best ways to give your children the power is to brainstorm ideas with them about what they can do to overcome any sense of boredom. Anything that they come up with, write it down and put it in the box. So the next time that they are bored or it’s a rainy day, you can have them pick up one of their own suggestions. Because it is their idea, they are more likely to do it.
These are just a handful of things that you can try. Keeping your kids occupied these days is amazingly difficult to achieve, even though there’s more stuff! So perhaps the solution when it’s a rainy day (or your child is just that bored) is to keep it simple.