My daughter is stubborn. Those who know me know that I earned that, and where it comes from.

But it can be some work getting her to cooperate. We are trying to get her to do more chores and often get the “I’m too tired” answer. Of course I have an answer to that one “Then go take a nap.”

She’s pretty resistant to her chore chart, which is what we’e trying to improve things. She gets so excited when she gets every chore done on a particular day, but if she’s missing some and is given the chance to work at it, she says she doesn’t care. It makes for an interesting challenge.

We’re also trying to get her to focus more on a given task. She goes from activity to activity, often without finishing the first one. She doesn’t pay very good attention in preschool.

It’s mostly her independent streak combined with stubbornness. When I offer to help her with something at home she doesn’t want help, or if it’s something unfamiliar, she’ll say “I can’t” and want me to do it, rather than help her. She does better at school, where she’ll at least try, but at home there’s just no way.

It’s hard to figure out the best way to improve her focus. We’re going to try regular assignments at home, along with being more insistent that she look at us when we talk to her. She’s generally all over the place. Hopefully she’ll learn to work on this stuff a little better. School gets so intense so young these days that she needs to learn how to behave so that she can focus on learning.

She’s bright, and learns a lot of things just on her own. She memorized her alphabet at 2, no coaching from us. She does basic addition of small numbers in her head already… no idea where she picked that one up. But now she needs to learn to learn from others too.