Reply to 5 and 8 year old are like animals

Forum Index » Elementary School-Aged Kids

Reply to "5 and 8 year old are like animals"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]This post made me LOL. I could have easily written it on a frustrating day when my sons were this age- minus the peeing thing. Mine are now 15 &13, good students and active in sports. I got a few calls home about one in early elementary (ended by 3rd grade or so) but never the other. Neither has any disorder or issue. I genuinely sympathize. Two active boys close in age are a handful for sure. things that I found:

(1) they need a TON of exercise and physical activity. An absolute ton- nothing is too much. Active camps, sports, swimming, biking, lots of time at the park etc. Unstructured time at home (unless they are totally exhausted from exercise already) generally will not go well. Outsourcing is great when you can- camps, sports etc. Swim team practices particularly wiped mine out- do that in the morning and they would be calm until mid late afternoon before they ramped up again. Seriously- exercise exercise exercise.

(2) screens are NO good for kids like this and will make the problem worse, no matter how tempting it is as a short term solution. If they will settle down and watch a movie or show for a bit AFTER a bunch of physical activity- fine. But keep it minimal and in check.

(3) separate the herd. They feed off of each other. Look for any opportunities to separate them. At one point in the summer, I had one DS in an AM sports camp and the other in PM sports camp so they were not together much during the day. A bit more driving but peace all.day.long. Obviously they still spent time together but avoid treating them as a unit, time apart can be wonderful. I often found behavior to be quite different when sibling was not present to distract them or provide opportunities to roughhouse…they were far more likely to sit down and do an art project, read etc. If both at home, enforced “quiet time” (even for an 8yo) to read or play quietly is a good thing at times. Allows a reset for all. 
[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics