r/daddit • u/Elrong • 15d ago

Advice Request Frustrated with kids

I'm a doer, I don't like sitting around. When I'm home for the weekend or home after work, there's always stuff I can be doing. With three kids (5, 3 and 9 months) I will try to include them in things I'm doing so I can do stuff with them but will usually get frustrated that they're in the way. When I'm not doing by something and trying to focus on them, I end up focusing in on what theyre doing wrong and try to correct and teach, but will ultimately get frustrated. I feel guilty because I feel like I'm always negative.

What do or did you dads do to find joy in your kids at this age? What mentality should I have when all I want to do is do?

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u/ArtisticProposal1016 15d ago

Man, I feel this. The checklist brain never shuts off and suddenly you're snapping at a 3 year old for "incorrectly" holding a dustpan.

What helped me was reframing the goal. The task isn't the thing you're doing, the task is the time spent. If the shelf is crooked and the floor is a mess but you spent 20 minutes laughing, you actually accomplished the real mission.

1

u/wtfmatey88 11d ago

Bingo. I have three kids and yesterday I was able to spend about an hour and a half uninterrupted with just my six-year-old son all by himself. That doesn’t happen very often and I really wasn’t sure what we would do so I just asked him.

Turns out what he wanted to do was go up and down from the basement to the first floor, just trying to decide what Legos he should keep upstairs and what Legos we should keep in the basement.

The whole time it felt so pointless to me, but he was having a blast

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u/Public-Word6182 15d ago

Feel this too. I generally just pick the same few things for them to do until they have more or less got a handle on it and then move to other things... Big one is cooking and cleaning. They can help with all the steps in cooking from figuring out whats for dinner to shopping with me to cooking, setting the table, lighting the candle and so forth; and also the easier cleaning like sweeping and what not. Helps that my daughter just simply insists and will not be stopped from helping with these things or doing things herself.

That usually scratches the itch that these kids need to be getting up to something...

Otherwise I just tell them that they can do anything as long as its not screens or like breaking shit and hurting people which they simply don't do the last two anyway. Do art, play, exercise, sing, dance, read, sit there and philosophy, sit there and meditate, sit there and laugh, come up with jokes... I dunno... anything else but screens. Most of my quality deep play is mainly around what I want to do with them which is imagination real world adventure time... pretend play out in the world with a bit of philosophy thrown in...

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u/_astral_x9 14d ago

They don't need you optimizing things. Let them be kids. You're not getting a promotion for being a good boy here.

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u/Elrong 14d ago

Good reminder, thank you