Repetition

Ok, this has been bothering me for a while, but I've been hoping & praying it was a phase that was going to go away. But, now I'm seriously going crazy & need help!

My boys are HUGE repeaters. It's constant repetition. CONSTANT. They even remember stuff they repeated ions ago & will repeat it later! At first, if I acknowledged whatever they said, they'd usually move on. Now that doesn't work. I've tried changing subjects, I've tried ignoring, and, sadly, I've discovered getting frustrated doesn't help either. Some car rides, I literally have to turn the radio up just to tune them out before I snap & require therapy.

Please give me some tips on how to make this stop. About 2 months ago, my husband sat on an old chair & it broke. Just tonight, they boys told me about 457 times that "Daddy broke the chair". Honestly? I believe I've heard that "daddy broke the chair" 570,039,388,382,383,203 times .

Dear Lord, someone please help me!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

I wish I could help, but my Eli is just the same. Drives me batty. I swear I've tried everything, too, and the 'right' answer to get him to stop repeating is always changing. It's got to stop someday, right? :gah:

 

No solutions, just commiseration! DS's latest obsession is who's a boy and who's a girl. If I had a dollar for every time today I heard, "Andrew is a girl. Andrew is not a girl, Andrew is a boy. Andrew is a boy. Ivy is a girl. etc etc"... His other grand passion right now is leaf blowers, and he will look at ANYTHING and say, "That's a leaf blower." :wacko:

 

:laughing: Sorry to laugh, but yeah, same thing here. Same stories as we drive down the street, same stories at the grocery store, you get the idea.

 

OMG what is it with the little people and repetition? I find myself going out of my way to ramble on about "new" things just to change the subject

 

Sounds normal to me. Mine are just 22 months old and have been doing THAT for a few months. It drives me insane but then again.. most of the things they do drive me insane so I figure: what's one more?

LOL.

I think it's just them practicing their speech and memorization skills; I guess I see it as them learning something and getting smarter

 

We are right there with you. Yesterday we went to the mall and Meara said about a million times "The easter bunny is not here today. He is at his other job!" Yeah, we don't go to the mall much I ended up getting them cookies to shut her up (nice, huh?).

 

hahahaaha My girls did that too. As someone else said, they are proud to be learning to talk and enjoying saying phrases and sentences. I found that if I repeated exactly what they were saying and then mimicked the structure of the sentence for another topic, they would get that idea and start changing some of the words around (makes it less crazy for mommy to listen to!!)

eg.
One may say "Sometimes I like the (colour) blue and sometimes I dont like the blue"
and after awhile I would say the same sentence then say right afterwards
"Sometimes I like yellow and sometimes I dont like yellow"
or
"Sometimes I like to read and sometimes I don't like to read"


They must have talked about 'sometimes they like...' for months but at least it was about different things hahaha

 

our current fav word is "why". of course i want my kids to ask questions to help them better understand the world but why x 10,000 gets a little frustrating.

 

Ok, this might seem a little kooky to you, but for some reason I've always had good memories of fairly early childhood - at least back to 3 if not 2.

I remember saying the same thing over and over, and asking 'but whhhhyyyyy', were ways I tried to get and keep an adults' attention. I remembered that the first time I said that thing it got attention and so I repeated it. Also there were often times when I wanted to say something (always have been a chatterbox) but didn't have anything to say, and the repetition came in again there.

I'm sure that's not the whole story and there's some age-appropriate developmental things going on too, but what I wrote is what I comfort myself with when I hear the same thing for the zillionth time.