Tiny Fingers and Beady Eyes! *how to be ready and prepare them for the shops

Visiting shops can often be a nightmare with tiny fingers and beady eyes! This blog will highlight how to be ready and prepare them.

There are many places to take your little one to, and being an Auntie or Uncle you can help save their parents a lot of training for their infant. It’s vital to take little one to places where there are things that everyday things go on throughout the day, one of those things is taking them to the shop or coffee shop, well yup, they need to know how shops have rules, and helping them to see they are helping you will focus their minds. Those little brains are taking in so much, so make it easy for them to work stuff out. 

First of all tell them “we are on a mission to find (for example) a nice body butter from a nice shop it has to smell nice and feel nice” and then ask them “what do we do in the shop?” And wait for their answers, it sometimes makes you laugh but they’re finding out how these things work.

Say the basics, like 

1. “We have to go into the shop, how do we behave?” 

2. say to them after their answers to that question “we need to keep our eyes open and our noses ready” 

3. ask them “why do we need to keep our hands to ourselves?” And don’t laugh at their answers, let them answer honestly. And just state “we need to be caring to the other people coming into the shop”. 

And it is vital they learn about paying for things and it does no harm to go to a shop and ask them to buy a sweetie and give them 50p and help them work out what that will buy them as a kind of game. It’s essential to enable them to work this out so just say that you are there to help them and they don’t have to use all of the 50pence piece. That will be a nice thing to do at the end of the main shopping because they have been learning (that’s even if they get things wrong, I mean, we only get better by learning through error). 

Please let them touch what you touch so they are not likely to pick something up randomly, that will help them to learn so much socially and their confidence develop.

And of course there’s the visit to a gallery! Get out there, take them to places that they will enjoy that aren’t just play sites. Next blog I will help you to know how to take them to places like a gallery.