Question:

“Playpen time used to be my son’s favorite time of the day. Admittedly, I haven’t been consistent with it for the last few months. He is now 16 months old and is having difficulty re-adjusting to his play time. I couldn’t find a solution to my dilemma in Babywise, is there anything I can do to help him readjust?”

Answer:

“Your Babywise II book has lots of information on this very issue in the Waketime Activities chapter. It is very common for all kids to go through times when a little re-training is needed to get them back into playpen time, room time, saying please, thank you, coming right away, cleaning their room, remembering to put the toilet seat down!! :) Anyway, you get the point. Re-training will be a regular part of your life as a mom, but you are in good company.

As with most re-training, often the best way to go about it is to step back and start again with small steps and then just gradually increase things as they get better.

Something else that really helps with playpen time and room time, is to have something objective setting the time. You want to teach him that playpen time isn’t dependent on how loud he is OR how determined you are to get him to like it either. But rather it is a set amount of time that he can trust will end and WILL happen no matter how he likes it. A great way to do this is with an egg timer, or alarm clock or anything you can set for a precise amount of time and have it sitting within his view.

Again, I’d suggest you start with something small. You can always have multiple playpen times throughout the day while you get him back into the swing of things, but he’ll catch on to this whole thing much faster if it’s short. So start with 5 minutes, for instance. Carry him and the egg timer toward the playpen all the while with a happy expression and tone of voice talking about how much fun he is going to have today (don’t worry if he’s already complaining at this point)

Show him the timer and show him that you are setting it. Put it down on a table near him and set him in the playpen and tell him cheerfully that you will be back as soon as the timer goes off. The moment it goes off, go right in clapping and smiling at how he had playpen time for a whole “5 minutes!!” and pick him up. That’s it! You should find that after several sessions like this, he’ll do great with 5 minutes. Be sure that even if he’s in there playing happily, you still get him as soon as the timer goes off. Once he does well with 5 minutes, increase the time to 10 minutes and so on until you are back up to where you want to be.