providing an endless amount of attention

My sons are very different. One is a classic introvert and one is an over-the-top extrovert. I personally am an introvert with extroverted tendencies. I am speaking of these personality traits in the sense of the Meyers-Briggs classification; an introvert essentially gets their energy from being alone and accomplishing things on their own; an extrovert gets their energy from interaction with others. The introvert tends to avoid and even dread dealing with other people; the extrovert cannot stand being alone and/or quiet. My number two son, the extrovert, needs attention CONSTANTLY. He is a little older now, and occasionally will sit by himself and read or play with a toy, but otherwise is asking to play with me, my wife, or my older son every minute of every day. I do not begrudge him his need for attention, and do as much as I can to engage him, keep him occupied, and pay as much attention to him as I can. However, it never, ever ends. It’s NEVER enough. I don’t have the energy to keep up with him, and neither do my wife and older son combined. He also tends to stray pretty quickly from activities and crafts that he asks us to set up for him, so that is a losing proposition. He will ask to paint; we will set up brushes, water, paints, and paper. We’ll get him dressed in grubbies. He will make one giant swash down the middle of the paper and say: “I want to build a racetrack out of wood.” Grrr - we JUST set up this painting activity! Now we have to take it down? And get going on some other complicated craft setup? If you’ve gone through this more than once, the response will soon become “no way”. Which becomes frustrating for him, especially when he was younger and had no way of reasoning things out with us or understanding that it was his behavior during the activity that was causing us to not want to do things with him. *Heavy sigh.* Of course, like most parents, we have discovered things that he will do for longer than 5 seconds and that we can roll back up quickly if he doesn’t want to do it after all. Board games are a big example. The best ones don’t involve a lot of setup, since he will suggest another activity while you are setting the first one up, if it takes too long. Unfortunately, he hates to lose. This is another fun aspect of his personality, hating to be told no, and hating to lose. He has gotten better about this over time, but it still makes him cry, and sometimes makes him not want to play that game any more. So, we let him win most times, and prep him big time when we see he’s about to lose. It usually works to play multiple times and just hope that he wins one, which gives him the corresponding amount of joy and usually erases the agony of defeat. Amazingly enough, he has allowed me to teach him chess and sticks with it even if he is losing. I give him a lot of breaks, and a lot of coaching, and he has comes back to it every couple of days with excitement and willingness to learn. So anyway, I just wondered the other day (first to myself and then out loud to my wife), what exactly it would take for him to feel completely satisfied with the amount of attention he was receiving. We have never had the energy or time to even get close; it’s frustrating for him and adds a little guilt to our parental burden, but -- the first thing that came to both of our minds was “There IS no amount of attention that would be enough.” It was consoling, in a way; we knew we would never be able to keep up with him and that he would have to adjust his needy behavior to fit in with the world around him. It made it clearer than ever that our focus should be on teaching him self-reliance, not on providing complete attention to an endless pit of need! Of course, employing that kind of strategy and approach does not mean that ignoring him will teach him self-reliance; we love the cute little bugger to death and want to play with him as much as we can. It’s just a matter of being able to STOP when we need to pay attention to our older son (or ourselves!), and not having the younger one have a major breakdown in order to draw the attention back to him. We shall see!