Cooperation Pebbles

This is a repost from my instagram @janajarrettnutrition :

Cooperation Pebbles is a term I use with my clients that comes from the spoon theory:

According to spoon theory, people wake with enough spoons to tackle the expectations of the day. They can tend to self care, home, job or studies or social plans and not worry that they’ll run out of energy, while neurodivergent people can’t simply rely on that & might run out of spoons during the daily tasks & routines. I like transferring that theory to children & cooperation: As mentioned before, imagine your child has a little backpack with cooperation pebbles – ideally after a restful night that backpack is full and we’re good to go.

Children don’t wake up and decide to purposefully mess up your day; some tasks or routines won’t make sense to them, especially since time keeping, length of tasks and urgency of things aren’t yet a concept to them.
When you wake up your child in the morning, ask them to brush their teeth and change out of pyjamas, your child gives you one of these pebbles. Depending on how many individual tasks your morning has, they already arrive with a less filled backpack at nursery, where they have to follow some more routines.

Maybe they have to interrupt play time to go to the loo or have lunch, participate in activities and follow the daily plans. That uses up pebbles. Free play, sleeping, eating and positive, self driven interactions all fill the backpack, but it’s safe to say when you pick up your child, their backpack is fairly empty.
So they might refuse to go home, cry when they see you or won’t be able to put on their own shoes or coat.

Keep in mind that your child is not working against you, they are working towards their own goals, always. And sometimes they simply have run out of pebbles.
When you have a busy day with deadlines ahead, make sure to plan for recharging points for both you and your child and always ask yourself if something needs to happen in an exact way (like: brushing teeth) or if you have some wiggle room (brushing teeth while watching a short video) to adjust the routine or activity to give your child an option to make their own decisions and not having to cooperate all day long.