How do you handle play dates for your kids?
Do you schedule them in advance?
Do you have them on the weekdays after school, or just weekends?
Do you set them up when the child asks, or do you try to make play dates for them?
SD8, who we have full time, seems to have plenty of friends at school - gets invited to a lot of birthday parties and has a couple girls she's always talking about playing with on the playground, but we never get calls for playdates for her. She complains about being bored sometimes when she's at home, but very rarely ever asks if she can have a friend over.
Just wondering how other families handle this - should we be rounding up friends for her, or leave it to her to ask if she wants company?
Nothing scheduled.
We don't schedule anything now, but we live in a neighborhood where there are lots of kids. My son is 10, so he's old enough to take off on his bike to find his friends. My daughter is 5, so she's too young to take off on her own, but there are kids her age next door and across the street. I send her out to play when there are other kids outside nearby. If you live in an area where there are lots of kids, they usually gravitate towards each other. Just being outside on a nice day, my kids meet and greet tons of other kids who are also outside playing. But my kids are both really outgoing and make friends easily. I don't know where they get it, because I was painfully shy as a youngster. If your SD is shy, she may just be waiting for the other kid(s) to make the first move.
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unlike SD my 7 yo niece gets
unlike SD my 7 yo niece gets on the phone as soon as she gets home from school and she also gets calls from her friends. she goes across the street to play w/the neighbors and is very good at making new friends at parties. sd does none of that and still has no friends at our neighborhood.
and we can't arrange any
and we can't arrange any playdates even if we wanted to cause we don't know any of her friends.
If it wouldn't create a
If it wouldn't create a furor w/your BM (don't know the circumstances), I would get a class list, email or call the parents of one of her friends and invite her friend over for a playdate. For my SD8, it's always arranged between the parents once there's clearly a relationship between girls.
Either after school or weekends seems to work fine, each usually lasts about 2 hours.
we have this dilemma too.
we have this dilemma too. sd9 always complains about not having kids to play with at our house. we have told her she can invite school friends here that all she has to do it let us know and we will check the schedule. she has lots of playdates and there are lots of kids in bm neighborhood, so she has to make no effort at bm's house.
she just won't get out and go looking here. she's not a shy kid, or didn't used to be, but i think she expects us to make all the effort for her. neither dh or i feel like it is our job to make friends for the kids.
can't seem to get them out to play short of ordering them out the door. even then they wont leave the back yard. WTF? I have never seen two kids that didn't jump on the chance to go ride bikes etc. and, they wont do anything unless they are together. if one doesn't want to go out the other refuses to go alone. i just don't get it.
That's funny. My step-kids
That's funny. My step-kids were the same way. We couldn't get them to leave the driveway or the yard. Finally, we took them to the park, waited til they were having a really great time they wouldn't want to have interrupted and said, "We're going home now (it's only a block or two away, just so you don't think we "abandoned" them), make sure to be home in less than an hour." Now they are asking all the time to go to the park. We are still working on getting them to introduce themselves to other kids, but as soon as we got them to accept this little bit of freedom, they met another family down the street that they've played with a few times.
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