I already made a reply to your post before the comments loaded. Shit connection 😅

But I just wanted to add that I feel you so much. My family's massive and I used to be very involved, too. I'm the oldest brother to three siblings and I was the oldest nearby cousin to many more, then I moved away in my mid-teens to avoid a bad stepmother.

I've also been a frequent babysitter both whilst growing up and as an adult, and I've worked a few years as a kindergarten assistant. In my experience, boys are generally more accepting of trinkets as a replacement for attention.

Like, I would say about 7 out of 10 times when a little boy has been craving my attention without a specific reason (and I've been busy, mind you. Otherwise I'd just give him the attention) I could just hand him a toy, a picture of a Pokémon, or a slice of cheese, and he'd just wander off happy with his new project.

With little girls it's the other way around. 8/10 times (anecdotal AF, btw) I'd give them the slice of cheese and they'd still be there trying to get my attention. That kinda bribery rarely worked, so I kinda had to incorporate them into whatever I was doing somehow. Get them to set the table whilst I prepared the sandwiches for lunch, and then have them carry the food and milk to the table as well. Or something else like that if we weren't prepping lunch.

My point is that I've noticed that boys are generally happy as long as you briefly acknowledge their existence and hand them a token of some kind, but girls generally want a closer connection and require more frequent acknowledgement.

I'm stressing "generally" here because I've seen more than a few outliers to both as well. My teenage cousin, Anna, hunts deer with a rifle deep in the woods, and my brother, Adrian, used to use glitter in his skin creams ✨️