Anytime there is an issue in my life, I want to hide it from the world. I talk to my wife about it, and usually no one else. This is partially due to embarrassment, but it’s also a combination of being bad at asking for help / not really wanting help. I mean, most people offer terrible advice that is either blatantly obvious or egregiously bad. So I just keep things to myself. Is it the healthiest way to deal with things? No, it is not. But, overall, it has worked out well enough for me.
And I feel like this is common with parenting. Everyone wants to celebrate our child’s triumphs and hide away the setbacks. I am 100% this way. Even if I felt like I needed advice, is it my business to discuss my son’s struggles? He didn’t sign up for that. I mean, this newsletter has an audience in the DOUBLE DIGITS. I haven’t done the math, but that’s like the whole world. But thinking about it more, no child is perfect, and sharing these moments might help others realize they are not alone. I mean, with a global influence like mine, it’s the least I can do.
With that being said, my son’s transition to daycare has not been great. He hated life, missed his parents, and his behavior was only getting worse. His potty training was nearly complete, and it reverted to a disaster. Plus, he was going on hunger strikes, refusing to rest, and not playing well with others. My wife literally spent her entire days fretting about what issue she was going to hear about when she had to pick him up later in the day. We finally switched him to half days which eliminated his chances of ruining other kids’ rest, but it didn’t fully take care of the other issues.
Early on, he was biting, scratching, and hitting other children and teachers. I am of the belief that hitting and scratching is going to happen, but even if I understand the urge to bite, I would be perturbed if my child was being bitten in the classroom. We focused very hard on the biting and things immediately got better, but just when we started to get comfortable, he had yet another incident. It had been about six weeks (although interrupted with a Covid scare), but the man just was not finding his fit in the classroom.
After the latest biting incident, they brought us in for a parents conference with the teacher and the director. We talked for 45 minutes about all the things that our son was doing wrong which was not the most fun way to spend an afternoon. The lowlight was when they recommended that we get him a permanent behavioral specialist to help with his development. My only thought was, “Are they kidding me?" but in my head, there were a lot of expletives thrown in. I know I see my son in the rosiest of ways, but I’m also a logical person, and these people were off their rockers to assume that this was anything more than a phase.
We drilled down and realized that when he doesn’t eat, he acts out, and we finally had a breakthrough when I told them that he does great with other kids at parks, but he seems to gravitate towards older children. They offered to put our 2.5-year-old in with the 3s and 4s to see if that would help, and we happily accepted as we felt a change of scenery couldn’t hurt.
It was like flipping a switch. Over the last two weeks, their biggest complaint about him is that we switched his shoes, and they kept flying off, and he never slowed down to put them back on. He hasn’t had incidents, he’s been eating more consistently, and he seems to be having a much better time.
It’s still only been two weeks so we’re not totally out of the weeds. He could regress, but all signs are positive at this point. Right now, it appears that there was no long-term developmental issue, but just a kid who needed a change of scenery and is now thriving around the older kids. If this continues, I fully expect him to be going to his first prom before learning multiplication.