Hopefully I'm not the only one that's experienced this; Eva is 3, and the youngest. Her older siblings LOVE to tell me what she's saying. This is to be expected though. Not only because she's the youngest, and in my experience most older siblings love to talk "for" their younger siblings, but my husband was a single father for 3 years, and had to rely on our oldest, Jack, to help him know what was happening. So if someone gets hurt, Jack is right there telling us what's going on. I am, however, trying to encourage Eva to actually talk for herself. Her vocabulary has grown by leaps and bounds just since my husband and I got married.
If she gets hurts...she will sit there and cry. I can tell that there's nothing seriously wrong, so I don't go rushing over there. Maybe this sounds insensitive to some people, but if I spent all day running at their every beck and call I would accomplish nothing. So I tell her, you need to calm down and tell me what happened. She usually doesn't, so I ask her to go sit on her bed until she can talk. Literally 30 seconds later she's out playing and just fine.
If she is frustrated...she starts crying or whining. We're working on her changing her own clothes, she can put them on just fine, but sometimes she has a hard time taking them off. So I've tried to encourage her by saying, "You are a big girl and you can do this." She's done much better at this.
My point in all this rambling is to say it's hard to teach them to do something. Sometimes it's so much easier to just do it yourself.
Not only are we dealing with Eva and encouraging her to express herself through words and not crying/whining. (I'm not against crying, trust me, I've done plenty of it myself lately.) All of them are old enough that they can do chores. I have Jack and Emma fold their own clothes and put them away, Eva helps me put hers away. But when it comes to consistently having them do other things, it's SOOO much easier for me to just do it. I know I need to stop that, otherwise I'll be hindering them from learning responsibility and basics of taking care of yourself, not to mention being part of a family means that you work together to accomplish what needs to be done.
I did not realize how easy I had it when I was a kid. Bless my parents for putting up with me...and my 6 siblings. :)
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