What is One of My Absolute Favorite Parenting Tools?

What is one of my absolute favorite parenting tools? Special one-on-one time with each child. No, I’m not talking solo trips across the country or even one-on-one dates to a restaurant or movie theater. Those things are awesome, but not exactly doable on a regular basis for most busy moms. I’m talking 5 minutes at a time, playing with your child. Put your phone out of arms reach. Don’t ask questions about their day or try to direct how the playing should go. Just follow their lead. This special, high quality attention can meet so many needs for both you and your child. It helps give them quality attention so they won’t need to resort to problem behavior like whining, arguing, or something else to get attention. It helps build your relationship with your child, strengthening the bonds you’ve already built in just 5 minute increments at a time. It helps pair you with reinforcement in their minds, meaning your presence isn’t just associated in their brains with things like telling them what to do, nagging them to please just get ready for school, or being the person who has to do hard things with them like getting shots at the doctor or practicing a new skill that is challenging. Special play time with your child can strengthen your connection with them.

I like to call it filling their buckets. There’s even a children’s book called “Have you Filled a Bucket Today?” that teaches kids to do kind things for others to fill their buckets.

What does filling your bucket mean? Imagine that we all have an invisible bucket we carry around with us. It holds our reserves of patience, contentment, and all kinds of yummy feel-good feelings. When something irritating happens, it dips into that bucket and takes some of our reserves. When we lose our patience, a whole bunch of our bucket gets tipped out.

So how do we refill our bucket? Connection with others. Positive reinforcement. Self-compassion. Things that give you those yummy feel-good feelings. Do our kids have the ability to engage in self-care and self-compassion? It’s not exactly developmentally appropriate for most of them, I’m guessing.

We can help them refill their buckets. The absolute easiest way to do this is special one-on-one time with them. Are you thinking: “But I spend HOURS every day with my child! Aren’t they getting ENOUGH attention from me already?! I’m exhausted!”? It’s not about quantity here, it’s about quality.

Instead of an hour long play session (who has time for that these days?!) where you run to change laundry over, answer text messages, attend to other family members’ needs, etc- find 5 minutes at a time. And don’t do any of the multi-tasking. Just focus on your child.

What does bucket filling time look like exactly?

1. Give it a special name so your child can differentiate this special play time from regular old multi-tasking mom time with you. Special Mommy Play Time, Bucket Filling Time, One-on-One Time, whatever!
2. No distractions. Or as few as possible. Put your phone away and make a big deal out of it so your child can really see that you are focusing on them. “I’m going to leave my phone over here on the table so it doesn’t distract me while we play on the floor.” Spend time with each of your children individually.
3. Do what your child wants to do. Follow their lead. Let them start playing and you just copy them. Don’t ask a million questions or try to redirect their play into something you want to do. That’s bucket dipping, not filling. If they are making noises while playing pretend- copy their noises, then you can put your own spin on things. Try to do things that aren’t screens- coloring, lego, pretend play, sports in the backyard, just listening to them explaining their latest video game and actually paying attention, etc.
4. Set a timer. Let your child know you are only focused on them for this amount of time. Start small. 5 minutes can make a big difference! When the timer goes off, thank your child for this special time together. Tell them your bucket is full or that you feel so much better after this special play time. Draw attention to the positive effects for you by modeling this out loud.
5. Pay attention to see if this is working for your family. Is it filling your child’s bucket? What about yours? How do you feel after? Is the whining or interrupting happening more often or less often after you have bucket filling time? Is your child asking you to play with them again? This is a good thing- they are enjoying it!
6. Try to increase to more frequent intervals. This means if you start by finding one day a week to spend 5 minutes alone with each child, work to increase that to 2 days a week, 3 days, and on until you can hit every day. Or if you start with one time per day spending 5 minutes of bucket filling time, increase it to twice a day, or 10 minutes at a time. Start small so it’s actually doable for you and then as you both are enjoying it, get creative to add more and more sessions!
7. Remember- quality not quantity.

So many parenting tips and strategies you see on the interwebs are lengthy. This one doesn’t require you to make a chart and laminate it. It doesn’t require you to spend any money or stay up late reading parenting books or blogs. Just play for a few minutes at a time. Make it special. Make it focused. Draw attention to it.

Try it out and see what happens in your home!

If you are looking for more specific ideas for your family, you can always book a free consult call here: https://www.parentingwithaba.org/coaching/