Oh dear. Now my darling daughter has finished her flu bug, I have it. This means that she’s home from preschool since there’s no one to bring her there and I don’t want to give it to the kids during circle time. She whined about this something awful this morning, at least until we embarked on a fun activity – making candied apples.
I have a confession to make. Sometimes I am not an enriching parent when I’m home with my daughter. I don’t feel too guilty, since I suspect that others are the same way. While we bake, go on walks, read, and play with our animals together, often I tell her to go and play. I think that’s all right, too, although sometimes I feel a little guilty that I’m not being the entertainer.
Should I be the entertainer? I think not. Not all of the time, anyway. It’s a fine balance. I don’t want my daughter to feel that my housework and work are more important than she is, and I enjoy playing with her. However, we also need to get things done, I need to rest when I am sick, and she needs to learn how to play on her own. In the last couple of days of non-enrichment, she has made about a dozen labels and painted them, played with trains and Lego, and made art with painter’s tape and straws (her two favorite art materials at the moment). She’s played doctor, cooked in her toy kitchen, made a fort, watered the plants, and interacted with our pets. She seems to have opened her box of Bandaids and so she has five or six pretend injuries that she’s nursing. Currently she is making a house with a fire escape for our pet rats.
Sometimes I feel like a bad mom for not engineering a constant flow of enriching activities for my daughter. However, I remember long hours in my bedroom as a small child, pretending that my closet was a deep, dark apartment. I remember playing outside by myself, digging holes and looking up at the trees. I am several years older than my brother and sister, so it was a few years until we could play as peers. Until that point, I spent a lot of time playing by myself. For an introverted kid, this “non-enriched” time was very soothing: I entertained myself, without other people interfering in my thought processes.
What do you think? Do we entertain our preschoolers too much through playdates, activities, and enriching home activities? Should we sometimes just let them be?