Four Ways to Help your Child Wait
Patience is a virtue — but it’s a complicated one, at least from the perpective of child development. Why can a five year old wait for dinner, but not for the next day? Why can’t your 2 year old seem to wait at all?
In my time as an occupational therapist, waiting, and in particular, a child’s ability to wait (or not, as the case may be) is a common struggle for families. So why is waiting so complicated? Is a child being disobedient? Are they ignoring you? Well, no. It’s more complicated than that.
The Influence of Time
The answer, strangely enough, is time.
Time? Yes. To understand why a child might struggle to wait, and how you can help them, you have to understand what the skill of waiting actually is.
What is waiting?
Waiting relies on a number of things:
Understand what time is
Time is a an abstract concept. It is man made. “But I just want him to wait five minutes!”
What is 5 minutes?
“Five minutes is 5 minutes, one after each other.”
And what is a minute?
“60 seconds”
And who actually came up with seconds? Is a second a moment? Enough time to take a breath?
Time in by it’s very nature, a man-made, abstract concept. Your child’s ability to wait depends on their concept of time. It’s also why children can struggle with “later”, “tomorrow” or “next week”.
For a 2–3 year old, what do these terms even mean? If you have a child who is neurodivergent, and struggles with abstract concepts, this understanding can take even longer to develop.
So, first a child needs to understand what time is. Why else can’t your child wait?
The Influence of Predictability/Routine
Routine is good for children. While spontinaity can be fun, too much spontineity makes things hard to predict. If things change every day, how do you know what will happen tomorrow? How do your parents know?
When you’re still developing a concept of “time” and “later”, it can be diffcult to trust that things will actually happen “later”. Children learn to trust “later” through repetition. “We will watch TV after diner”. They eat dinner, and get to watch TV. As children grow older, and things happen as promised, over and over again, they start to build a concept of linear time, and a reassurance that things will happen when they’re supposed to happen.
The Influence of Age:
Concepts such as understanding time, and trusting in the predictability of life come with age. A 1 year old will struggle to wait longer than a few seconds — a two year old longer than a few minutes, and so on and so forth. Make sure you are setting expectations that the child can meet. This is doubaly so for children who are a bit behind their peers, or struggle with abstract concepts.
Strategies to Help your Child be Patient:
From this, we can use a few strategies to help a child wait. Keeping in mind developmental expectations:
- Make the abstract concrete
- Build routine in moments
- Follow through on what you say you will do
- Start small and work your way up
- Make the abstract concrete:
If time is so abstract, how can we make it less confusing? For small kids, counting can work well, as they can see fingers going down. Using indicators of time — “when we finish watching this program,” “when we finish eating” can also be helpful. By making the indicator of time an action (eating, watching, ect), the child is able to measure how far along they are in the task. This is more concrete than “after x time” — eg “after dinner”, “after TV”. After is still an abstract consept and there’s not real indicator of when after is.
Timers can also be very useful — most of us have a phone with a watch app, and a little circle that slowly disappears as a timer ticks down. Show your child this circle, and show them it getting smaller. Give them reminders as you go along “5 minutes left (show timer), 2 minutes left (show timer)” so they can see it getting smaller and understand what that means in relation to how much time they have left.
2. Build routine in moments
In early childhood there’s a lot of talk about daily routines. But small routines (first we will do this, then this) are just as important. They are also a lot more flexible, a lot easier for younger children to understand, and easier to “prove”.
For example: First we shower, then we go to bed
- There are only two concrete actions here, and they are in a concrete order
- Following through is done close to instantaneously. This gives the child an oppertunity to tie these events to the “first/then” pattern of speech.
- It’s easier to follow through and be reliable on a parent on something that you decide moment by moment, vs trying to plan out a whole day
3. Follow through (when you can)
Waiting is not just about understanding time, but also trusting that things will happen. You can understand what “five minutes” means, but if you’ve never actually gotten something or had something happen after “five minutes”, then waiting will be competing with anxiety.
Following through can be difficult sometimes — life is varied and complex. But if you can, being accurate about what you’re promising when you tell a child to wait can be helpful. “Five minutes” or “after bath-time” is a promise to a child, even if they might be placeholders for “later” for adults.
4. Start small and work your way up
Developmentally, a child learns to wait for a short amount of time before they learn to wait for along amount of time. Teach you child to wait for moments before hours, and don’t expect “later” or “tomorrow” to work until about 3/4, or later, depending on the child and their understanding of the abstract.
What other strategies have people found useful? These are the ones I’ve come across the most in my work in early childhood development, but I’m sure there’s a bounty of other strategies out there.
