A couple observations. First of all, there are two kinds of toys and games. It sounds like your kids have the closed-ended kind. Closed-ended means games with rules you have to follow, toys that you do this and that happens – everything about these toys is pre-programmed. Once the kid does it right, the fun is gone – like, how often can you push the same button and get the ball to bounce and still think it’s fun?
Open-ended games and toys have no rules; everything about these toys says create your own game, make up your own world, write your own rules, do your own thing. Kids spend days – not hours, but days! – playing with open-ended toys. Now kids love these toys and play with them for hours (so parents get a break). But parents hate open-ended games and toys because they are messy. OMG, can they get messy. Examples include Legos, arts and craft supplies, paper, building blocks, erector sets, Capsella, microscopes and science stuff and everything in your house from foil, to paper, to fabric. Kids use this stuff to build cities, space ships, robots, stages, fashion shows, costumes, laboratories, games, and entire worlds.
Give a kid some paint, brushes and big sheets of blank paper and they will paint and draw and cut and glue for hours. Give kids big buckets of junk, like old toys, plastic bottles, bits and pieces of anything and they will create, create, create. Give them some old magazines and they will make up families and stories and fill up scrapbooks and photo albums and design their own magazines, make their own picture books.
Next observation. Have you inadvertently divided your family’s home into two separate homes - upstairs for you and downstairs for the children? Think about the rooms in your home. Every room in a home is open to everyone, except the bedrooms. Bedrooms are the private spaces of a home – as in, this is “my” room – stay out. If you go upstairs and into your bedroom during the day to take a nap, you have left your kids unsupervised and alone. From now on, take naps downstairs in the living room.
Last observation. It sounds like you are “watching” your children instead of interacting with them. “Watching” children is what babysitters do. “Interacting” with children is what parents do. Everything you do at home, from cooking, to cleaning and watching TV is an opportunity for interaction. Keep your kids in the kitchen to help you make dinner and clean up. Involve your children in every single household chore, from cooking, to laundry, to scrubbing toilets, to making grocery lists, to watching TV and listening to music - together.
