How to Teach Patience to Children

How to teach patience to children and how to handle difficult situations. This is our  ‘count to 30’ approach that help us teach our kids about patience and sharing.

In my post on patience and sharing, I touched quickly on 5 ideas on how to handle tough situations with small kids being impatient or fighting over some toys or other stuff. Here I will explain you some more on our counting method to get our kids to wait for their turn.

When having two or more small kids play together, it often ends up with both of them wanting to play with the same toy (or the same baby as in the picture below). It’s typical situation when your attention is drawn by lots of screaming and you see many little hands pulling on the same object.

How to teach patience to children? Who had the toy first? Who started the fight? No clue and our kids are usually of no help to answer these. So let’s forget about that!

I tried google for suggestions and I ended up mostly with stuff as ‘Take the toy away’, ‘lock them both in their room’, … I was not really satisfied with these solutions and felt that there must be better ways to do this and a smarter way of how to teach patience to children. What I do at home is that I try teaching our kids to share and see (most of) their toys as common toys, rather than just theirs. Nowadays when Victoria gets a present she would spontaneously say it’s also of Lukas and Elena. With this in mind and after some trial and error, I came up with the idea and successfully implemented the ‘count to 30’ approach.

1- How to teach patience to children: Get their attention.

The issue at hand in these situations is that the kids want the toy NOW (the other can play also, but me first) and they are so stuck on that, that they don’t have much time to listen to you. What I discovered with our kids is that I need to create an opening, get their attention. So what I do is that I let one of the kids play with the toy (that’s already one that stops screaming) and focus my attention on the other. To stop the crying and screaming I take number two in my arms, confirm that he/she will get the toy and that daddy, or mommy, will help to get the toy.

(Picture above: who gets to play first with the doll bed?)

2- How to teach patience to children: Agree on waiting together and count to 30.

I tell both of them that daddy will count to 30 and then number 1 has to give the toy to number 2. I then start counting and when getting close to 30, I give it a little climax (intonation, counting louder) and have them hand over the toy when I reach 30. To my surprise in the beginning, I didn’t need to force things -they would hand the toy over voluntarily. I might need to repeat the procedure a couple of times though until one of the two looses interest in the toy.

They’ve gotten so used to it by now that it takes no more explaining, I just start counting and they get along with it. And only in seldom cases do I actually get to 30, usually the toy changes hands long before I get there.

Why 30? I guess it was the inspiration of the moment 😉 . At the time I started this, none of our kids could count that far which left me in control of the ‘counting part’. I would count faster or slower depending on the urgency of the situation. I felt like having this 30 deadline gives the comfort to number 2 that he will get the toy and thus it calms him down. In the same time, this gives sufficient time to number 1 to enjoy playing with the toy in peace. I have noticed also that as soon as number 2 stops fighting for it, most of the time the toy already seems less interesting for number 1. And hey, as a positive side-effect, the kids learn how to count 🙂

Do you have any tricks on how to teach patience to children and how to handle kiddie disputes?