The list of twenty things that didn't work

I knew exactly what they liked. It made no difference at all.

For a long time I did the thing that seems obviously sensible.

I made a list. Twenty things to try when you are bored, written out, stuck where they could see it. And when that didn't take, I offered options out loud instead. How about the beading? How about the trampoline? What about Lego?

None of it landed.

What made it strange is that I was not guessing. I had watched them lose an entire hour to every one of those things. The beading, at one point, had eaten a whole wet afternoon. I was not suggesting things they disliked. I was suggesting things I had personally seen absorb them completely.

And it still didn't work.

What I eventually understood

Knowing what your child likes is not the same as it being theirs that day.

An interest is not a fixed property, like eye colour, that can be looked up and acted on. It is closer to an appetite, and appetites move. What held them for two hours on Tuesday can be genuinely unappealing on Thursday, and there is nothing wrong with either.

But that is the smaller half of it.

The bigger problem is that a list of good options is still a list somebody else wrote. Even a perfect one.

When I say "how about the beading," what I have handed over is a decision with the interesting part already removed. They are not deciding what to do. They are picking from a menu, and picking from a menu takes four seconds and requires nothing of them.

Why that matters more than it sounds

The bit I wanted them to practise was the bit I kept doing for them.

Working out what to do with an empty hour is the whole skill. Not filling the hour. Not doing something worthwhile in it. Deciding, from nothing, with no options presented, what the hour is going to be.

Every time I offered three good suggestions, I removed the only part that was any use.

They complied, usually. They would take one and do it for twenty minutes without much interest. And I would think, well, that worked, and then be puzzled when nothing carried over to the next day.

What I do instead

Nothing, mostly, which took a long time to learn.

And when nothing is genuinely unbearable for everyone, I narrow rather than choose. Are you in the mood to touch something, listen to something, or look at something? Then, if they pick one: something squishy, something bumpy, or something with wheels?

Notice what that still leaves them. I have handed over a domain. They have to fill it, and the filling is the part that matters.

Often we never get to the end of it anyway, because somewhere around the second question they wander off and do something else entirely.

Which was always the point.