She’s nine. Her fabulous Grandmother signed her up for a Tinker Crate subscription which means each project comes with a plethora of tiny pieces from mold sprues to extra LEDs to backup resistors, each of which hurts to be stepped on. And those are absolutely guaranteed to be left on the floor for tender adult feet to find.
He’s ten. He loves Lego. And he puts his Lego away. Mostly. Except for the tiny pieces that are feet destroyers. Why those? Why are those the ones left on the floor?
Rewards don’t work. Chore charts don’t work. Appeals to empathy don’t work. Why don’t they work?
Because of cognitive development. One of the executive functions of a fully mature human brain is something called detailed perceptive awareness — the ability to notice physically small objects that are out of place in an environment: those sprues or single-bump foot-destroying Lego. It is, unless you’ve gotten tremendously lucky with an abnormally developing child (in which case as a caring parent you are making sure to understand their diagnosis and what accommodations they might need in areas they are not as advanced), not an executive function you can rely on in your child at the tween stage.
But your feet? They don’t want the ouch.
There is a way.
Mats. Or blankets. Or a tarp. Something visual, fold-able, and with clearly defined boundaries. This is one of my favorite mats
but I have also used old receiving blankets or picnic blankets still flitting about the house. Even a beach towel will do.
All you have to do is contain tiny-toy terror play to the mat or blanket by parental rule and enforcement. Have them build the Tinker Crate contraption on the mat. The Lego are built on the blanket. And when attention fades and the project is to be put down, the mat must be folded up and returned to whence it came, meaning everything on the blanket has to go somewhere because it cannot stay there.
Everything.
Everything has to go somewhere.
Everything, meaning including the tiny toys of terror.
And the best part is that a mat or a blanket can be folded in half and sort of funneled into a box or a container which is so much easier to tidy than asking a child of limited focus to individually pinch grip each and every tiny toy of terror. Or even better … into the trash (for those sprues).
