Just wondering…Taking turns at a play park

What do you do when your child is 2, and at the play park, and another child, probably a year or 2 older, comes along to play with the same slide. Your child is very happy to have them to play with. But the child keeps pushing ahead, deliberately taking 2-3 turns, when your child is learning about taking turns, and looks a bit mystified as to why this is happening. But still wants to play with the other child. You slightly question it with the child, saying along the lines of, “really, are you sure it’s your turn?” Their parent is sitting well away, and clearly has negligible interest. Do you just go with the flow? I really don’t this idea - as what am I then teaching my child? Or what else?

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I would personally intervene and softly tell the other child “oh I think it’s his turn now”. It usually works. One time a kid tried to snatch something out of my child’s hands and my child was so confused and submissive, and when I saw him this way I immediately told the kid “oh no no he was playing with that” and she just shrugged and walked away.

Good to know - I did try with this child, but she was clearly delighted with herself in pushing ahead. But it’s good to know that I should perhaps be more persistent. And the snatching by other children - that’s another ballgame. We recently went to football and the number of 3+ children who would just run up and grab things from younger children was grim especially as parents seemingly couldn’t care less.

It’s so frustrating when you always make sure your child is polite and never snatches things from other children😣

Exactly. And it worries me about what the polite child is learning from that. It’s so annoying when parents pay no attention to what their young children are doing to other children, or just choose to turn a blind eye.

Sometimes when my son asks me why other children are doing wrong things I would explain to him that they do not know how to share and take turns and that they still need to learn how to do so, and I would follow by reassuring him that he however is doing very well in sharing/taking turns. Not sure if this is a correct approach in parenting but I feel it’s better than just telling him these kids are bad, he needs to know that they just were not taught these things ❤️

Good thinking really

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