What is your senior infant child (boy) into?

LegacyUser

I have a child who is socially delayed and struggling and I want to give him every tool in his pocket to make social interactions easier. At the moment, he plays with his 3yr old sister which is brilliant but very immature. What does your senior infant/6/7yr old boy watch and play with? What does he talk to his friends about?
Sorry, worried parent here.

farmchoice

PurpleLlama wrote: »

I have a child who is socially delayed and struggling and I want to give him every tool in his pocket to make social interactions easier. At the moment, he plays with his 3yr old sister which is brilliant but very immature. What does your senior infant/6/7yr old boy watch and play with? What does he talk to his friends about?
Sorry, worried parent here.

its very difficult, we want the best for our kids and hate to see them struggling, and there is nothing worse them to see them struggling socially.

having said that its easy to over estimate how mature other kids are compared to our own. kids in junior/senior infants can be much more immature then we think. you see them going off to school and imagine them having friends and talking about things in the yard and having shared interests.

the reality is a lot of the time at that age they just run around each other shouting.
the capacity for proper interaction and friendship often only comes later.
my own son seemed to struggle a bit with this in school. luckily around first class he developed a great interest in football and this became his thing and there was always a football game on the go in the yard that he could play in. of course it lead to rows over teams and who wouldn't pay with who and who cheated and who wouldn't pass the ball but by and large it was great.
in turn he joined the gaa club and the rugby club and the soccer club and got great social interaction out of those and met new kids his own age. plus childrens sports these days is a very controlled environment and everyone gets a turn and no one is left out so it is especially good for kids who might struggle a bit socially ''in the wild'' so to speak.


i ended up doing a small bit of coaching with 5/6/7 year olds as a result and it was a real eye opener.
a lot of kids that age are little more then babies by and large they are a lot more immature then one might expect.



a note of caution though, dont push him into sports if he is not ready, wait until he wants to.

shesty

PurpleLlama wrote: »

I have a child who is socially delayed and struggling and I want to give him every tool in his pocket to make social interactions easier. At the moment, he plays with his 3yr old sister which is brilliant but very immature. What does your senior infant/6/7yr old boy watch and play with? What does he talk to his friends about?
Sorry, worried parent here.

If you don't mind me asking, what do you mean by socially delayed and struggling??
I have an almost 6 year old girl, she is only a JI but most of her class turned 6 this year.There is a huge variety in how they interact socially.And probably moreso between girls and boys also.

lazygal

Have a senior infant boy.
He's obsessed with lego. Absolutely obsessed. He could spend an entire day with it. He makes sets and then disassembles and makes new stuff. I bought him some books on lego which he loves for ideas.
TV wise he loves Storybots and similar programmes. He's asked for video games but we've decided no. Ditto a tablet. He does some maths games on my laptop.
He's not into sports and has expressed zero desire to join the GAA despite heavy recruitment attempts at school. If he wants to do a sport when he's older we'll investigate.
He does a lot of pottering. Helps me with baking, cooking etc. We got a microscope in Lidl which is interesting. We do some arts and crafts.
But if he was choosing himself he'd do lego all day every day.
Also interested in what you mean by socially delayed? I know other boys in my son's class play Minecraft or some such and have older brothers who would be a big influence. There's a couple who have what I consider inappropriately lax parental control over devices and after one or two playdates with them we've kind of tried ot cultivate other friendships because I wasn't keen on some of the peer pressure. He's been doing video calls with some class mates in recent weeks. Obviously play dates are out but I have had to be proactive about having kids over rather than waiting for him to ask.

mirrorwall14

Junior infant or nearly senior infant. Pokemon and Lego are his favourite. He spends half his days in the garden fighting off bad guys and the other half building ships and weapons with Lego. He doesn’t follow any instructions it’s all imagination. He loves pokemon and football cards but can’t read so he’s hilarious playing with them in whatever way he feels like changing the rules whenever he feels like it. Not sure how that will go down when they can all read

Tv wise he watches pokemon sun and moon, power rangers, the old scooby doo cartoons and old Teenage mutant ninja turtle cartoons.

afkasurfjunkie

Similar to last two replies here. Almost 6 year old boy. Loves Lego and robots. Would play with it and his transformers all day long. If the conversation at school steered towards GAA or soccer, he would be utterly lost. Zero interest. His nearest cousin is six months older then him and she would lose and find him in a heartbeat. Girls are a lot more mature than boys.
He’s also the oldest so has no one to follow. I can already see how his younger brother is more streetwise in ways.

lazygal

I don't think it's even a boy or position in the family thing. My boy has an older sister and cousins. He's just the way he is and instead of steering him towards stuff just to fit in we're working on fostering some confidence in himself so he has a strong sense of who he is and can hold his own. No point in making him play with lego if he's not into it. What kind of things does he like op? You just need one other friend who's into the same thing to build a bit of a social network.

ax530

Lego the characters mostly and any other character toys imaginext ect
Cycling, scooter
Colouring or activity books

jlm29

My 8 yr old boy loves Pokemon. Has done since the end of junior infants. He brings the cards into school, and they swap them in the yard. Seems to be a great source of social interaction, there’s a few in a few different classes who are into them. I hate them though, they’re such a waste of money, and all I can see when I look at them Is food for the recycling bin
Toys wise, he did love Lego until a while back, but has gone off it a bit. He has a couple of sets of hot wheels Too which get good use, but I can’t see him striking up conversations about them at the sane time

Moonbeam

my 7 year old boy loves Minecraft, Roblox, lego and reading. Outside it is mostly bouncing on the trampoline. He has 3 sisters 11,9 and 6.